CHAPTER II

INHERITANCE: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE


Three forms of speech were current in Scotland in the time of Burns,
and, in different proportions, are current to-day: in the Highlands,
north and west of a slanting line running from the Firth of Clyde to
Aberdeenshire, Gaelic; in the Lowlands, south and east of the same
line, Lowland Scots; over the whole country, among the more educated
classes, English. Gaelic is a Celtic language, belonging to an
entirely different linguistic group from English, and having close
affinities to Irish and Welsh. This tongue Burns did not know. Lowland
Scots is a dialect of English, descended from the Northumbrian dialect
of Anglo-Saxon. It has had a history of considerable interest. Down to
the time of Chaucer, whose influence had much to do with making the
Midland dialect the literary standard for the Southern kingdom, it is
difficult to distinguish the written language of Edinburgh from that
of York, both being developments of Northumbrian. But as English
writers tended more and more to conform to the standard of London,
Northern Middle English gradually ceased to be written; while in
Scotland, separated and usually hostile as it was politically, the
Northern speech continued to develop along its own lines, until in the
beginning of the sixteenth century it attained a form more remote from
standard English and harder for the modern reader than it had been a
century before. The close connection between Scotland and France,
continuing down to the time of Queen Mary, led to the introduction of
many French words which never found a place in English; the proximity
of the Highlands made Gaelic borrowings easy; and the Scandinavian
settlements on both coasts contributed additional elements to the