Yer da sells Avon: how the Scots language found a new home on Twitter

allthingslinguistic:

A great article about the Scots language on twitter. Excerpt: 

Clas­sic con­tri­bu­tions includ­ingKings­ley the Partick This­tle mas­cot;​‘yer maw’ jokes; ​‘yer da sells Avon’ jokes; any­thing Lewis Capal­di tweets, and ​“maw bought aldi show­er gel that smells like fairy liq­uid so I’ve been cut­ting about all day smelling like a fuck­ing plate” (@adamfraser14, August 2015).

For many peo­ple both out­side Scot­land and with­in, Twit­ter has pro­vid­ed a brand new view into the Scots lan­guage and its vari­eties in all their sweary, hys­ter­i­cal, some­times incom­pre­hen­si­ble glo­ry. Has the plat­form spear­head­ed a resur­gence amongst its young users or is this some­thing more pro­found altogether?

The Scots lan­guage has been spo­ken in Scot­land for cen­turies and still exists across the coun­try today. It’s com­prised of numer­ous dif­fer­ent dialects – which can dif­fer from each oth­er quite dra­mat­i­cal­ly – and is one of three offi­cial lan­guages in Scot­land, along­side Eng­lish and Gael­ic. In 2001 it was offi­cial­ly recog­nised under theEuro­pean Char­ter for Minor­i­ty Languages.

“Scots was the nation­al lan­guage of a coun­try that doesn’t exist any­more,” explains writer and pre­sen­ter Alis­tair Heather, who writes a Scots col­umn in Scotland’s The Nation­al news­pa­per. ​“As Scot­land was amal­ga­mat­ed into Great Britain, Scots fell away from being a nation­al lan­guage because it didn’t have a nation anymore.

Read the whole thing. 

Yer da sells Avon: how the Scots language found a new home on Twitter