Luath Scots Language Learner sampler

INTRODUCTION
was the ancestor of modern Welsh. In the north of Scotland other
languages were spoken, and prominent among these was Pictish. In
modern times only fragments of written Pictish remain; and it is not
clear to us even what kind of language it was, or to which others it was
related.
After the Romans’ withdrawal from Britain, waves of invaders began
to arrive, from Ireland, from the Low Countries, and from Scandinavia.
In the west, the people whom the Romans called the Scoti 2 brought the
Gaelic language to the part of Scotland that, nowadays, we call Argyll.
In the east, the Anglo-Saxon tongue came to what is now South East
Scotland, after Ida Eoppason settled in Bamburgh in RQT CE. He and his
successors established the ancient kingdom of Northumbria between
the rivers Forth and Humber, albeit to have it eventually captured by
the Danes in the ninth century. Although Anglo-Saxon was the ancestor
of both Scots and English, there were substantial differences between
the speech of the Angles, who settled in Lothian and Northumbria, and
that of the Saxons who settled further south. This is one of the sources
of the differences between Scots and English as we know them today.
During the so-called Dark Ages, the territory where Gaelic was spoken
widened. By the eleventh century, it was the language of the monarch
and the court, and was spoken throughout what we know today as
Scotland, with two exceptions. Those exceptions were Lothian (which
did actually have a Gaelic-speaking minority and which had continued
under its own ruler following the Danish conquest of Northumbria);
and Orkney, Shetland, and part of Caithness, which at the time were
all Norse possessions. Lothian was finally annexed by Scotland in the
eleventh century.
However, the eleventh century also saw the marriage of Malcolm ááá=to
a wife from England, and by the end of the twelfth century the
language of the monarchy had changed and was a language derived
2 The derivation of the name Scoti is unclear, although it is
probably not a name by which the people concerned identified
themselves. Even so, the name Scoti is the basis of the name
‘Scotland’ that we use today.
R