Customer Reviews

Luath Scots Language Learner: An Introduction to Contemporary Spoken Scots

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This is an easy to use book for people wanting to learn Scots. It has 25 graded lessons, English-to Scots vocabulary list, verb tables, dialogues for you to practice, grammatical explanations and exercises. It also has a wee bit about background on life in Scotland.

This is very good introductory course for those wishes to learn the language you heard growing up or for Americans wanting to get more in touch their their heritage. There are some good dictionaries on Scots, but this is a long-awaited, first course for teaching yourself. A winning point for American usage - it assumes the user has no prior knowledge of Scots, so it works very well for very basic beginners of Scots.

It's set up with an accompanying audio CD (Sold separately; ISBN: 1842820265) which I highly recommend getting to use with the book. You really need to hear pronunciations. So, if you like Burns but have trouble reading him, you will be reading Robbie like a pro buy the end of the lessons.

The lessons are fun and easy to follow, so this is highly recommended for those interested in learn Scots language.

For those who wondered, Scots is a real language, not just an 'accent' used in films, with a few odd-sounding words thrown in! This book makes it all clear in concise, easy to use and practical lessons that are also interesting from a cultural point of view. Aside from strengthening your ties to your heritage, you can get more pleasure out of reading Stevenson or Diana Gabaldon - in fact you will be even better informed than most authors! Probably the best (maybe the only) book on this language out there! The book includes an offer for CDs as well.

This is a good introductory text on Scots. This book does a great job of describing proper usage and grammar, as well as providing common language patterns as contrasted with English. The background information about Scotland is also very interesting. The back of the book includes a handy English to Scots vocabulary section, but it does not also provide a Scots to English section. In addition, the book does not contain an index. This makes it less useful as a reference book, but it's still a good way to acquaint yourself with Scots.

Is Scots a language or a dialect? The question of where to draw the line is invariably political and I have quite some sympathy for Scots speakers' claims to the integrity of the "mither tongue".
At the same time, history has complicated the linguistic system in Scotland in ways that resemble Germanic Switzerland (where people speak Schwytzetütsch but write Hochdeutsch) or Scandinavia where 3 closely related dialects have separate language status for political reasons. It's fairly hard to imagine Scots ever attaining official status again which, in many ways may be a pity. Kudos to the efforts of language activists and I hope that spoken Scots at least, will become a symbol of cultural pride rather than cultural cringe for its speakers but, let's not kid ourselves, a foreigner who tries to learn to speak Scots is invariably going to sound a prat!
In short, I enjoyed this book and I respect its attempt to describe modern Scots but I'm a little bemused by the idea of foreigners like me trying to learn it. My surname may be McCallum and my granddad may have been a Scot but I sound like grounskeeper Willie if I try to put on the tartan!