Scots And Scottish Standard English Case Study

The linguistic situation in Scotland has been dominated by Scots and Scottish Standard English, where Scots is a descendant of Old English and SSE is a compromise between Scots and southern English.
Scottish Standard English has been formed since 17th century as a result of contacts between Scots and British English.
Scots and SSE are distinguishable from each other more than any other pair of English standard/vernacular varieties (Johnston, 2007: 110).
However, there is still no general agreement on how the relationship between these two idioms has to be seen. Some scholars consider Scots to be a regional dialect of the English language, referring to many similarities on all language levels and only a minor role of Scots in the official
Douglas, 2006; Corbett & Stuart-Smith, 2012). The continuum approach takes into account the diversity of subvarieties between Broad Scots and Scottish Standard English. SSE is a homogeneous variety and its grammatical and lexical systems are similar to that of southern English. Broad Scots, however, includes a large number of varieties of Scots that can be significantly different from each other. Each variety in the continuum reflects a complex interaction of different social, geographical and contextual factors. Scottish English refers to an umbrella term covering the whole continuum (Pic.
Code-switching and drifting in the Scottish English continuum
As was mentioned before, the boarders between Scots and SSE are not clearly defined. Speakers in Scotland move along the continuum code-switching and code-drifting (Douglas, 2006: 46, Johnston, 2007: 110), so that they have a large range of possible options. Code-switching here refers to a conscious shifting between codes, whereas drifting is an unconscious action. In addition, drifting is not a binary choice: code-drifters can mix systems using different features of different varieties inside the continuum. Such behaviour is an organic feature of the Scottish linguistic repertoire (McArthur, 1992: 103).
A. J. Aitkin (1984, 2015) introduced a model of Scottish speech (Pic. 2) that represents the range of choices available to speakers in Scotland. Words from Columns 1 and 2 are considered to be Scots, whereas SSE terms are represented in Columns 4-5. Column 3 represents items that two polar varieties share. Accordingly, Columns 1 and 5 contain lexical items of Scots and SSE correspondingly; Columns 2 and 4 contain lexical items for Scots and SSE that differ phonologically. This paper concerns the lexical level of the continuum so that words from Columns 1 and 5 are in focus for the analysis. These two columns present two distinctive systems available to speakers in Scotland for linguistic