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91-762: Pollokshaws ( Scots : Powkshaws ) is an area on the South side of the city of Glasgow , Scotland . It is bordered by the residential neighbourhoods of Auldhouse to the east, Eastwood and Hillpark to the south and Shawlands to the north, with the Glasgow South Western Line railway and the open lands of Pollok Country Park to the west. The White Cart Water flows through the area. The housing stock consists of some sandstone tenement housing , modern brick tenement-style buildings, low-rise social housing and high rise/multi-storey tower blocks. Previously eight tower blocks stood in an area known as

182-923: A 1996 trial before the Census, by the General Register Office for Scotland (GRO), suggested that there were around 1.5 million speakers of Scots, with 30% of Scots responding "Yes" to the question "Can you speak the Scots language?", but only 17% responding "Aye" to the question "Can you speak Scots?". It was also found that older, working-class people were more likely to answer in the affirmative. The University of Aberdeen Scots Leid Quorum performed its own research in 1995, cautiously suggesting that there were 2.7 million speakers, though with clarification as to why these figures required context. The GRO questions, as freely acknowledged by those who set them, were not as detailed and systematic as those of

273-650: A Scots language listing. The Ferret, a UK -based fact-checking service, wrote an exploratory article in December 2022 to address misconceptions about the Scots language to improve public awareness of its endangered status. In Scotland, Scots is spoken in the Scottish Lowlands , the Northern Isles , Caithness , Arran and Campbeltown . In Ulster , the northern province in Ireland , its area

364-469: A collection of children's nursery rhymes and poems in Scots. The book contains a five-page glossary of contemporary Scots words and their pronunciations. Alexander Gray 's translations into Scots constitute the greater part of his work, and are the main basis for his reputation. In 1983, William Laughton Lorimer 's translation of the New Testament from the original Greek was published. Scots

455-433: A continuum ranging from traditional broad Scots to Scottish Standard English . Many speakers are diglossic and may be able to code-switch along the continuum depending on the situation. Where on this continuum English-influenced Scots becomes Scots-influenced English is difficult to determine. Because standard English now generally has the role of a Dachsprache ('roofing language'), disputes often arise as to whether

546-571: A five-year period. Secretary of State for Scotland Godfrey Collins believed that one could visualise the end of Scottish slums by the end of 1938. Toward the end of 1936 throughout the United Kingdom, around 25,000 people living in slum housing were being rehoused each month, which had totalled around 450,000 by August 1936. Upon the outbreak of World War II, there were around 1,300 proposed slum clearance orders, of which 103 had been confirmed by January 1940, but virtually no slum housing

637-494: A future project. Pollokshaws Clock Tower, located on Pleasance Street, is the surviving part of the old Town House, built in 1803. There was a ground-floor school with a court-room and a police cell above it. From 1818, the Town House building also housed a library. The Pollokshaws Burgh Charter empowered the council to hold courts for the trial both of civil actions and criminal offences. A jail to incarcerate local wrongdoers

728-539: A more phonological manner rather than following the pan-dialect conventions of modern literary Scots, especially for the northern and insular dialects of Scots. Slum clearance in the United Kingdom Clearance of slum areas resumed and increased after the war, while the 1960s saw the largest number of house renewal schemes pursued by local authorities, particularly in Manchester where it

819-696: A name for the Lowland vernacular. The Gaelic of Scotland is now usually called Scottish Gaelic . Northumbrian Old English had been established in what is now southeastern Scotland as far as the River Forth by the seventh century, as the region was part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria . By the tenth century, Middle Irish was the language of the Scottish court , and the common use of Old English remained largely confined to this area until

910-413: A number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects exist, they often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum , with Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is sometimes regarded as a variety of English, though it has its own distinct dialects; other scholars treat Scots as a distinct Germanic language, in the way that Norwegian

1001-504: A racecourse to the southwest of the village, on land now occupied by Kennishead Road and Cowglen Golf Club. The races initially developed in conjunction with the local holiday, the Pollokshaws Fair, and were viewed more as an excuse for drinking and socialising rather than a serious sporting event. Pollok F.C. 's Newlandsfield Park is in the area, adjacent to Pollokshaws East railway station . Scots language Scots

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1092-612: A representative sample of Scotland's adult population) claim to speak Scots to varying degrees. The 2011 UK census was the first to ask residents of Scotland about Scots. A campaign called Aye Can was set up to help individuals answer the question. The specific wording used was "Which of these can you do? Tick all that apply" with options for "Understand", "Speak", "Read" and "Write" in three columns: English, Scottish Gaelic and Scots. Of approximately 5.1 million respondents, about 1.2 million (24%) could speak, read and write Scots, 3.2 million (62%) had no skills in Scots and

1183-506: A suitable medium of education or culture". Students reverted to Scots outside the classroom, but the reversion was not complete. What occurred, and has been occurring ever since, is a process of language attrition , whereby successive generations have adopted more and more features from Standard English. This process has accelerated rapidly since widespread access to mass media in English and increased population mobility became available after

1274-469: A tollbooth, it is the only surviving example of this type of building in the area, others having been lost to road development, and a rare example of an older building in Pollokshaws following 20th century slum clearance and redevelopment. It is now Category B listed. Following the abolition of road tolls in the 1880s it served as a carriage hire premises, a pub, and latterly as a private house up until

1365-476: A vulnerable language by UNESCO . In a Scottish census from 2022, over 1.5 million people in Scotland reported being able to speak Scots. Given that there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect , scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots, particularly its relationship to English . Although

1456-542: Is a language variety descended from Early Middle English in the West Germanic language family . Most commonly spoken in the Scottish Lowlands , the Northern Isles of Scotland , and northern Ulster in Ireland (where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots ), it is sometimes called: Lowland Scots , to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic , the Celtic language that was historically restricted to most of

1547-591: Is also used, though this is more often taken to mean the Lallans literary form . Scots in Ireland is known in official circles as Ulster-Scots ( Ulstèr-Scotch in revivalist Ulster-Scots) or "Ullans", a recent neologism merging Ulster and Lallans. Scots is a contraction of Scottis , the Older Scots and northern version of late Old English : Scottisc (modern English "Scottish"), which replaced

1638-604: Is closely linked to but distinct from Danish . Native speakers sometimes refer to their vernacular as braid Scots (or "broad Scots" in English) or use a dialect name such as the " Doric " or the " Buchan Claik ". The old-fashioned Scotch , an English loan, occurs occasionally, especially in Ulster. The term Lallans , a variant of the Modern Scots word lawlands [ˈlo̜ːlən(d)z, ˈlɑːlənz] ,

1729-562: Is in Scots, for example. Scott introduced vernacular dialogue to his novels. Other well-known authors like Robert Louis Stevenson , William Alexander, George MacDonald , J. M. Barrie and other members of the Kailyard school like Ian Maclaren also wrote in Scots or used it in dialogue. In the Victorian era popular Scottish newspapers regularly included articles and commentary in the vernacular, often of unprecedented proportions. In

1820-767: Is lykest to our language..." ( For though several have written of (the subject) in English, which is the language most similar to ours... ). However, with the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England, most writing in Scotland came to be done in the English fashion. In his first speech to the English Parliament in March 1603, King James VI and I declared, "Hath not God first united these two Kingdomes both in Language, Religion, and similitude of maners?" . Following James VI's move to London,

1911-591: Is sometimes used in contemporary fiction, such as the Edinburgh dialect of Scots in Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (later made into a motion picture of the same name ). But'n'Ben A-Go-Go by Matthew Fitt is a cyberpunk novel written entirely in what Wir Ain Leed ("Our Own Language") calls "General Scots". Like all cyberpunk work, it contains imaginative neologisms . The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

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2002-567: Is used to describe the Scots language after 1700. A seminal study of Scots was undertaken by JAH Murray and published as Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland . Murray's results were given further publicity by being included in Alexander John Ellis 's book On Early English Pronunciation, Part V alongside results from Orkney and Shetland, as well as the whole of England. Murray and Ellis differed slightly on

2093-540: Is usually defined through the works of Robert John Gregg to include the counties of Down , Antrim , Londonderry and Donegal (especially in East Donegal and Inishowen ). More recently, the Fintona -born linguist Warren Maguire has argued that some of the criteria that Gregg used as distinctive of Ulster-Scots are common in south-west Tyrone and were found in other sites across Northern Ireland investigated by

2184-481: The English Dialect Dictionary , edited by Joseph Wright . Wright had great difficulty in recruiting volunteers from Scotland, as many refused to cooperate with a venture that regarded Scots as a dialect of English, and he obtained enough help only through the assistance from a Professor Shearer in Scotland. Wright himself rejected the argument that Scots was a separate language, saying that this

2275-509: The Linguistic Survey of Scotland . Dialects of Scots include Insular Scots , Northern Scots , Central Scots , Southern Scots and Ulster Scots . It has been difficult to determine the number of speakers of Scots via census, because many respondents might interpret the question "Do you speak Scots?" in different ways. Campaigners for Scots pressed for this question to be included in the 2001 UK National Census . The results from

2366-735: The Protestant Church of Scotland adopted the 1611 Authorized King James Version of the Bible; subsequently, the Acts of Union 1707 led to Scotland joining England to form the Kingdom of Great Britain , having a single Parliament of Great Britain based in London. After the Union and the shift of political power to England, the use of Scots was discouraged by many in authority and education, as

2457-791: The Romance languages via ecclesiastical and legal Latin , Norman French , and later Parisian French , due to the Auld Alliance . Additionally, there were Dutch and Middle Low German influences due to trade with and immigration from the Low Countries . Scots also includes loan words in the legal and administrative fields resulting from contact with Middle Irish , and reflected in early medieval legal documents. Contemporary Scottish Gaelic loans are mainly for geographical and cultural features, such as cèilidh , loch , whisky , glen and clan . Cumbric and Pictish ,

2548-597: The Scottish Highlands , the Hebrides , and Galloway after the sixteenth century; or Broad Scots , to distinguish it from Scottish Standard English . Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English , as the two diverged from the same medieval form of English. Scots is recognised as an indigenous language of Scotland by the Scottish government, a regional or minority language of Europe, and

2639-469: The Second World War . It has recently taken on the nature of wholesale language shift , sometimes also termed language change , convergence or merger . By the end of the twentieth century, Scots was at an advanced stage of language death over much of Lowland Scotland . Residual features of Scots are often regarded as slang. A 2010 Scottish Government study of "public attitudes towards

2730-594: The University of Aberdeen , and only included reared speakers (people raised speaking Scots), not those who had learned the language. Part of the difference resulted from the central question posed by surveys: "Do you speak Scots?". In the Aberdeen University study, the question was augmented with the further clause "... or a dialect of Scots such as Border etc.", which resulted in greater recognition from respondents. The GRO concluded that there simply

2821-557: The 17th century. A group of Flemish weavers were brought to the area in the 19th century by the landowners, the Maxwells of Pollok, on account of their exceptional weaving skills. Pollokshaws was granted a charter to become a Burgh of Barony in 1812. It became a police burgh in 1858 and remained a burgh of Renfrewshire until 1912 when it was annexed to the City of Glasgow. Though it had been an industrial area, this changed in 1957 when it

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2912-451: The 1950s. It was subsequently used for council storage but is now vacant and isolated on the roundabout. Pollokshaws Bowling Club was formed in 1854 and was originally across from Pollokshaws West railway station. On the club's centenary, the clubhouse and greens moved into Pollok Park rent free thanks to Sir John Stirling Maxwell. The Pollokshaws Races, an informal horse racing event staged annually from around 1750 until 1883, took place on

3003-422: The 20th century were successful in removing the worst of the country's housing stock and helped improve the quality of homes available for the poor and working class. Generally, no account of the incident or impact of housing clearance was taken before the 2000s. Between 1895 and 1918, Liverpool engaged in wide-scale slum clearances, and constructed more homes than any authority outside of London . New housing

3094-554: The Crowns in 1603, the Standard English of England came to have an increasing influence on the spelling of Scots through the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England. After the Acts of Union in 1707 the emerging Scottish form of Standard English replaced Scots for most formal writing in Scotland. The eighteenth-century Scots revival saw the introduction of a new literary language descended from

3185-454: The Kingdom of Great Britain, there is ample evidence that Scots was widely held to be an independent sister language forming a pluricentric diasystem with English. German linguist Heinz Kloss considered Modern Scots a Halbsprache ('half language') in terms of an abstand and ausbau languages framework, although today in Scotland most people's speech is somewhere on

3276-520: The Philosopher's Stane , a Scots translation of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone , was published by Matthew Fitt . The vowel system of Modern Scots: Vowel length is usually conditioned by the Scottish vowel length rule . The orthography of Early Scots had become more or less standardised by the middle to late sixteenth century. After the Union of

3367-480: The Scots language was also featured. It was found that 1,508,540 people reported that they could speak Scots, with 2,444,659 reporting that they could speak, read, write or understand Scots, approximately 45% of Scotland's 2022 population. The Scottish Government set its first Scots Language Policy in 2015, in which it pledged to support its preservation and encourage respect, recognition and use of Scots. The Scottish Parliament website also offers some information on

3458-471: The Scots language" found that 64% of respondents (around 1,000 individuals in a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) "don't really think of Scots as a language", also finding "the most frequent speakers are least likely to agree that it is not a language (58%) and those never speaking Scots most likely to do so (72%)". Before the Treaty of Union 1707 , when Scotland and England joined to form

3549-581: The Scottish Executive recognises and respects Scots (in all its forms) as a distinct language, and does not consider the use of Scots to be an indication of poor competence in English. Evidence for its existence as a separate language lies in the extensive body of Scots literature, its independent – if somewhat fluid – orthographic conventions , and in its former use as the language of the original Parliament of Scotland . Because Scotland retained distinct political, legal, and religious systems after

3640-509: The Shawbridge Corridor; the last of these blocks was demolished in March 2016. Four other tower blocks remain, near Pollokshaws East railway station . According to the 2001 Census , Pollokshaws had a population of 4,295. Its residents are a mixture of working class and middle class social groups, and the area also had a large South Asian community. Pollokshaws was originally a village predominantly dedicated to weaving in

3731-638: The Standard English cognate . This Written Scots drew not only on the vernacular, but also on the King James Bible , and was heavily influenced by the norms and conventions of Augustan English poetry . Consequently, this written Scots looked very similar to contemporary Standard English, suggesting a somewhat modified version of that, rather than a distinct speech form with a phonological system which had been developing independently for many centuries. This modern literary dialect, "Scots of

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3822-497: The Union, many Scots terms passed into Scottish English. During the 2010s, increased interest was expressed in the language. The status of the language was raised in Scottish schools, with Scots being included in the new national school curriculum . Previously in Scotland's schools there had been little education taking place through the medium of Scots, although it may have been covered superficially in English lessons, which could entail reading some Scots literature and observing

3913-653: The activities of those such as Thomas Sheridan , who in 1761 gave a series of lectures on English elocution . Charging a guinea at a time (about £200 in today's money ), they were attended by over 300 men, and he was made a freeman of the City of Edinburgh . Following this, some of the city's intellectuals formed the Select Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. These eighteenth-century activities would lead to

4004-708: The area of their own choice. Few comprehensive studies were conducted at the time on the effect on communities being broken up and resettled. In 2002, the Labour government launched the Housing Market Renewal Initiative scheme, aiming to demolish, refurbish or construct new housing, which ran until 2011. Known as the Pathfinder programme, areas of housing were demolished and replaced with new houses that were aimed towards aspirational tenants, rather than for residents that had formerly lived in

4095-521: The book" or Standard Scots, once again gave Scots an orthography of its own, lacking neither "authority nor author". This literary language used throughout Lowland Scotland and Ulster, embodied by writers such as Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Murray , David Herbison , James Orr, James Hogg and William Laidlaw among others, is well described in the 1921 Manual of Modern Scots . Other authors developed dialect writing, preferring to represent their own speech in

4186-575: The border between English and Scots dialects. Scots was studied alongside English and Scots Gaelic in the Linguistic Survey of Scotland at the University of Edinburgh , which began in 1949 and began to publish results in the 1970s. Also beginning in the 1970s, the Atlas Linguarum Europae studied the Scots language used at 15 sites in Scotland, each with its own dialect. From the mid-sixteenth century, written Scots

4277-566: The complementary decline of French made Scots the prestige dialect of most of eastern Scotland. By the sixteenth century, Middle Scots had established orthographic and literary norms largely independent of those developing in England. From 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster , some 200,000 Scots-speaking Lowlanders settled as colonists in Ulster in Ireland. In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one. The name Modern Scots

4368-680: The concept of general improvement areas, where improvement grants were available. It was estimated in 1970 that around 5 million people lived in condemned houses. The criteria to determine the type of house that could be defined as a slum were amended in the 1969 housing act, typically being applied to houses unfit for habitation and those beyond reasonable repair cost. In some cases, a slum clearance area could be declared without swift action, such as in South Kilburn where 342 unfit houses were identified in 1965 yet only 22 had been demolished by 1970, with local MP Laurence Pavitt commenting that

4459-524: The country's poorest dwellings were in the North West region. In Manchester, many dwellings were considered uninhabitable, with an estimated 54,700 dwellings, representing 27.1% of the total, being unfit for habitation. Around three-quarters of the region's poorest residences were located in a belt of land dominated by Manchester and Liverpool. The decline of the region was noted in comparison to comments made by antiquary John Leland , who in 1538 described

4550-403: The creation of Scottish Standard English . Scots remained the vernacular of many rural communities and the growing number of urban working-class Scots. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the use of Scots as a literary language was revived by several prominent Scotsmen such as Robert Burns . Such writers established a new cross-dialect literary norm. Scots terms were included in

4641-457: The documentary series "The Detonators". Low-rise, mainly private housing has replaced the blocks. A group of four towers at Shawhill remain standing going into the 2020s, along with a single block at Cartcraigs on the southern periphery of the district. Pollokshaws Burgh Hall on Pollokshaws Road, built in 1895–98 by architect Robert Rowand Anderson in the Scots renaissance style , was originally

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4732-434: The earlier i-mutated version Scyttisc . Before the end of the fifteenth century, English speech in Scotland was known as "English" (written Ynglis or Inglis at the time), whereas "Scottish" ( Scottis ) referred to Gaelic . By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the English language used in Scotland had arguably become a distinct language, albeit one lacking a name which clearly distinguished it from all

4823-749: The early twentieth century, a renaissance in the use of Scots occurred, its most vocal figure being Hugh MacDiarmid whose benchmark poem " A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle " (1926) did much to demonstrate the power of Scots as a modern idiom. Other contemporaries were Douglas Young , John Buchan , Sydney Goodsir Smith , Robert Garioch , Edith Anne Robertson and Robert McLellan . The revival extended to verse and other literature. In 1955, three Ayrshire men – Sandy MacMillan, an English teacher at Ayr Academy ; Thomas Limond, noted town chamberlain of Ayr ; and A. L. "Ross" Taylor, rector of Cumnock Academy – collaborated to write Bairnsangs ("Child Songs"),

4914-516: The fifteenth century, much literature based on the Royal Court in Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews was produced by writers such as Robert Henryson , William Dunbar , Gavin Douglas and David Lyndsay . The Complaynt of Scotland was an early printed work in Scots. The Eneados is a Middle Scots translation of Virgil 's Aeneid , completed by Gavin Douglas in 1513. After

5005-416: The five years ending June 1965, Manchester was ahead of the other cities in the number of houses either demolished or compulsory purchased with a view to demolition. Towards the end of the 1960s, slum clearances and the consequent destruction of communities were causing concerns for the government. The Housing Act 1969 was introduced to help authorities overcome problems with slum clearances by introducing

5096-483: The houses deemed unfit in 1955 and was one of 38 local authorities classed as having clearance problems requiring special attention. From 1964 to 1969, 385,270 houses in England were demolished or condemned during slum-clearance schemes. Slum clearance accelerated during the 1960s: 10,000 more slum houses were demolished during 1968 than in 1963. In a speech in the House of Commons in 1965, Alf Morris noted that 20% of

5187-544: The housing problem was of the most importance to his constituents. In September 1971, the National House Condition Survey estimated that there were around 1.2 million unfit properties in England and Wales, of which 700,000 (58%) fell within existing or proposed areas for clearance. By the early 1970s, new housing estates were mostly occupied by residents who had been displaced by slum clearance or those who were deemed in greatest need. However that

5278-622: The language in Scots. In September 2024, experts of the Council of Europe called on the UK Government to "boost support for regional and minority languages", including the Scots Language. The serious use of the Scots language for news, encyclopaediae, documentaries, etc., remains rare. It is reportedly reserved for niches where it is deemed acceptable, e.g. comedy, Burns Night or traditions' representations. Since 2016,

5369-574: The language used in different situations. Such an approach would be inappropriate for a Census." Thus, although it was acknowledged that the "inclusion of such a Census question would undoubtedly raise the profile of Scots", no question about Scots was, in the end, included in the 2001 Census. The Scottish Government's Pupils in Scotland Census 2008 found that 306 pupils spoke Scots as their main home language. A Scottish Government study in 2010 found that 85% of around 1000 respondents (being

5460-418: The life of many older properties. By 1985, England and Wales had seen over 1.5 million houses declared unfit or demolished over a 30-year period, displacing over 3.6 million people. The Labour government in 2002 launched the Housing Market Renewal Initiative scheme, with the primary objective to demolish housing considered undesirable and replace with new developments. Also known as the Pathfinder programme,

5551-571: The local dialect. Much of the material used was often Standard English disguised as Scots, which caused upset among proponents of Standard English and proponents of Scots alike. One example of the educational establishment's approach to Scots is, "Write a poem in Scots. (It is important not to be worried about spelling in this – write as you hear the sounds in your head.)", whereas guidelines for English require teaching pupils to be "writing fluently and legibly with accurate spelling and punctuation". A course in Scots language and culture delivered through

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5642-493: The medieval Brittonic languages of Northern England and Scotland, are the suspected source of a small number of Scots words, such as lum (derived from Cumbric) meaning "chimney". From the thirteenth century, the Early Scots language spread further into Scotland via the burghs , which were proto-urban institutions first established by King David I . In fourteenth-century Scotland, the growth in prestige of Early Scots and

5733-614: The medium of Standard English and produced by the Open University (OU) in Scotland, the Open University's School of Languages and Applied Linguistics as well as Education Scotland became available online for the first time in December 2019. In the 2011 Scottish census , a question on Scots language ability was featured In the 2022 census conducted by the Scottish Government , a question in relation to

5824-404: The mid-1950s. In 1960, 50 local authority clearance figures suggested long-term problems in addressing slums. Through the period 1955–1960, of the estimated 416,706 dwellings deemed unfit, only 62,372 had been cleared by 1960. The authority with the highest number of unfit homes was Liverpool with around 88,000, closely followed by Manchester. By March 1963, Liverpool had only cleared around 10% of

5915-467: The municipal headquarters of the independent burgh before passing into the ownership of Glasgow Corporation following annexation. Now a Category A listed building , it was closed by the council in the 1990s but subsequently reopened for community use by a charitable trust. Sir John Stirling Maxwell Primary School, located on Bengal Street / Christian Street, was a standalone red sandstone building by architect John H Hamilton, completed in 1907. The site of

6006-402: The newer houses had priority allocation given to those who had lost their previous home through demolition. Throughout Britain and other developed countries, historical housing literature suggests that slum clearance and housing renewal policies have had the opposite effect on the poorest people, whom they aimed to support, from that intended: new housing built to replace demolished slum dwellings

6097-420: The newspaper The National has regularly published articles in the language. The 2010s also saw an increasing number of English books translated in Scots and becoming widely available, particularly those in popular children's fiction series such as The Gruffalo , Harry Potter , Diary of a Wimpy Kid , and several by Roald Dahl and David Walliams . In 2021, the music streaming service Spotify created

6188-401: The old court Scots, but with an orthography that had abandoned some of the more distinctive old Scots spellings and adopted many standard English spellings. Despite the updated spelling, however, the rhymes make it clear that a Scots pronunciation was intended. These writings also introduced what came to be known as the apologetic apostrophe , generally occurring where a consonant exists in

6279-458: The other English variants and dialects spoken in Britain. From 1495, the term Scottis was increasingly used to refer to the Lowland vernacular and Erse , meaning "Irish", was used as a name for Gaelic. For example, towards the end of the fifteenth century, William Dunbar was using Erse to refer to Gaelic and, in the early sixteenth century, Gavin Douglas was using Scottis as

6370-497: The past (e.g. Corby or the former mining areas of Kent ). In the 2022 census conducted by the Scottish Government , it was found that 1,508,540 people reported that they could speak Scots, with 2,444,659 reporting that they could speak, read, write or understand Scots, approximately 45% of Scotland's 2022 population. Among the earliest Scots literature is John Barbour's Brus (fourteenth century), Wyntoun 's Cronykil and Blind Harry 's The Wallace (fifteenth century). From

6461-891: The problem of inner-city slums. Clearance strategies were used predominantly during the early 20th century for redeveloping urban communities, such as in relation to the Housing Act 1930 (also known as the Greenwood Act), which required councils to prepare slum clearance plans, and some progress was made before the start of the World War II . Up to February 1932, 394 clearance areas were declared in England and Wales, affecting 64,000 people. Estimates in 1933 by local authorities in Scotland suggested that nearly 62,000 new homes needed to be built to replace demolished slum housing, of which around 90% were expected to be built within

6552-413: The remainder had some degree of skill, such as understanding Scots (0.27 million, 5.2%) or being able to speak it but not read or write it (0.18 million, 3.5%). There were also small numbers of Scots speakers recorded in England and Wales on the 2011 Census, with the largest numbers being either in bordering areas (e.g. Carlisle ) or in areas that had recruited large numbers of Scottish workers in

6643-470: The scheme ended in 2011, due to the Conservative austerity program. From the late 19th century up to the 1970s, clearance of slum housing was seen as an expensive undertaking with numerous problems, although generally considered a necessity to achieve a higher standard of living. In the years following World War II, areas affected by slum clearance were usually replaced by social housing, while many of

6734-462: The school was previously donated by local philanthropic landowner Sir John Stirling Maxwell, after whom it was named. The school was closed in June 2011 and despite local pressure and campaigns the building was allowed to rot and stood derelict for some years. It was demolished in 2023 after being deemed structurally unsafe beyond repair, with the council promising to save and re-use some of its features in

6825-521: The seventeenth century, anglicisation increased. At the time, many of the oral ballads from the borders and the North East were written down. Writers of the period were Robert Sempill , Robert Sempill the younger , Francis Sempill , Lady Wardlaw and Lady Grizel Baillie . In the eighteenth century, writers such as Allan Ramsay , Robert Burns , James Orr , Robert Fergusson and Walter Scott continued to use Scots – Burns's " Auld Lang Syne "

6916-536: The thirteenth century. The succeeding variety of Northern Early Middle English spoken in southeastern Scotland is also known as Early Scots . It began to further diverge from the Middle English of Northumbria due to twelfth- and thirteenth-century immigration of Scandinavian-influenced Middle English–speakers from the North and Midlands of England . Later influences on the development of Scots came from

7007-426: The town of Manchester as "the fairest, best builded" town he had seen. Morris considered that Manchester had shown "more vigour courage and compassion" than other cities in tackling the slum housing problem, with 4,000 houses demolished both in 1963 and in 1964, in line with set targets. When comparing slum clearances undertaken by Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield and Bristol, figures suggested that for

7098-820: The twentieth-century biographer of James Boswell (1740–1795), described James's view of the use of Scots by his father Alexander Boswell (1706–1782) in the eighteenth century while serving as a judge of the Supreme Courts of Scotland : He scorned modern literature, spoke broad Scots from the bench, and even in writing took no pains to avoid the Scotticisms which most of his colleagues were coming to regard as vulgar. However, others did scorn Scots, such as Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals David Hume and Adam Smith , who went to great lengths to get rid of every Scotticism from their writings. Following such examples, many well-off Scots took to learning English through

7189-604: The varieties of Scots are dialects of Scottish English or constitute a separate language in their own right. The UK government now accepts Scots as a regional language and has recognised it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages . Notwithstanding the UK government's and the Scottish Executive's obligations under part II of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages,

7280-489: Was a "quite modern mistake". During the first half of the twentieth century, knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary norms waned, and as of 2006 , there is no institutionalised standard literary form. By the 1940s, the Scottish Education Department 's language policy was that Scots had no value: "it is not the language of 'educated' people anywhere, and could not be described as

7371-431: Was built in 1845. After the 1912 annexation of Pollokshaws Burgh to the City of Glasgow, most of the Town House was demolished and only a public campaign managed to save the remaining Clock Tower. The Round Toll is a circular building now located on the central island of the roundabout of the same name (junction of B762 Barrhead Road / Nether Auldhouse Road and B769 Pollokshaws Road / Thornliebank Road). Built around 1820 as

7462-499: Was cleared during the 15 years following the outbreak of war. The drive to clear slum houses resumed in 1955, particularly in Manchester where 68,000 were deemed to be unfit. By 1957, slum clearances were well under way according to Henry Brooke , the Minister of Housing and Local Government , who stated that houses condemned or demolished had gone up from 20,000 in 1954 to 35,000 by 1956, while rehousing over 200,000 people during

7553-659: Was increasingly influenced by the developing Standard English of Southern England due to developments in royal and political interactions with England. When William Flower , an English herald , spoke with Mary of Guise and her councillors in 1560, they first used the "Scottyshe toung" . As he found this hard to understand, they switched into her native French. King James VI , who in 1603 became James I of England , observed in his work Some Reulis and Cautelis to Be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie that "For albeit sindrie hes written of it in English, quhilk

7644-477: Was intended for tenants displaced by demolition of their old home, although not everyone displaced was re-homed, and only those who could pay the rent were offered a new home. In Leeds , where many slum clearances were of back-to-back houses , the land they occupied was very small and usually incapable of supporting any new profitable developments; this impacted upon site-value compensation. While new council housing had been built, little had been done to resolve

7735-760: Was not always the case. The construction of the Byker Wall in Newcastle upon Tyne was intended to provide modern social housing for the residents of Byker , an area of run-down back-to-back housing. Although the new development won many awards, fewer than 20% of the original 1,700 Byker residents were eventually housed there by 1976. Data from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government suggests that clearances between 1955 and 1985 resulted in around 1.5 million properties demolished and affected about 3.7 million people, although this does not account for people who left

7826-415: Was not enough linguistic self-awareness amongst the Scottish populace, with people still thinking of themselves as speaking badly pronounced, grammatically inferior English rather than Scots, for an accurate census to be taken. The GRO research concluded that "[a] more precise estimate of genuine Scots language ability would require a more in-depth interview survey and may involve asking various questions about

7917-408: Was often too costly to rent for poorer families, who had lost their homes to make way for newer developments; these typically became occupied instead by the upper working class. In the period following the 1970s, opinions started to change towards the view that clearance was less than effective and too costly, both fiscally and in terms of the break-up of communities. Demolition programmes throughout

8008-605: Was proposed as the second Comprehensive Development Area in Glasgow (the first was Hutchesontown ). The area was demolished and rebuilt anew. Several residential tower blocks were built as part of the CDA plan in the 1960s. Most of these were later demolished between 2008 and 2016 in the Shawbridge Corridor regeneration. The blowdowns of the first two towers in July 2008 was filmed in detail by an American company and can be seen as part of

8099-461: Was reported around 27% 'may' have been unfit for human habitation, although the majority were well built solid structures that could have been renovated or repurposed. Housing, churches, schools and pubs that formed close-knit communities were devastated, with families dispersed across other areas. Towards the end of the decade, a housing act in 1969 provided financial encouragement for authorities and landlords to improve existing housing stock and extend

8190-432: Was the notion of "Scottishness" itself. Many leading Scots of the period, such as David Hume , defined themselves as Northern British rather than Scottish. They attempted to rid themselves of their Scots in a bid to establish standard English as the official language of the newly formed union. Nevertheless, Scots was still spoken across a wide range of domains until the end of the eighteenth century. Frederick Pottle ,

8281-497: Was translated into Scots by Rab Wilson and published in 2004. Alexander Hutchison has translated the poetry of Catullus into Scots, and in the 1980s, Liz Lochhead produced a Scots translation of Tartuffe by Molière . J. K. Annand translated poetry and fiction from German and Medieval Latin into Scots. The strip cartoons Oor Wullie and The Broons in the Sunday Post use some Scots. In 2018, Harry Potter and

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