Re: dialectal diversity in English

Chris Bates wrote:


> I know the difference between gaelic (learned a bit once) and english,
> and I'm talking about a dialect of english not gaelic. Its possible that
> they could be bilingual and that that could make their english even more
> difficult to understand but I am not getting gaelic and english
> confused. And I do not mean african creoles either.
Well, in the whole continuum of languages in Scotland you have two families:
Germanic and Celtic.  In the germanic family you have two "languages":
English and Scot.  Scottish English (this is English as spoken natively by
Scots who speak English) is different than Scot, if I have correctly
understood John.

Not sure on the distribution, but if I am not mistaken, (Scotish) English is
spoken in Glasgow, Gaelic is spoken in the Hebrides and Scot is spoken in
the North.

About Scot, I have only seen the examples posted in this list.

Now.  Is Scot a different language than English or just the most northern
dialect of Scotish English?  Ethnologue claims they are different.

Ethnologue also claims Catalan and Valencian are the same and I have seen
quite a few flames in Spanish newsgroups discuting this isue and giving
examples of contrasting texts between both "languages".

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