Scots: The Mither Tongue

Learned a lot from the book and there is broad coverage. The book is interesting throughout. Three areas that can frustrate readers: If you don't already read Scots well, the many and sometimes long Scots passages in block quotes can be extremely difficult. You can guess your way through some phrases but the assumption seems to be (confirmed by the concluding paragraph addressing the reader as someone Scottish) you can read Scots fluently. Only very occasionally are Scots words in quotes glossed. Secondly, pronunciation explanations never include phonetic alphabetic glosses and instead offer occasional comparisons which are ambiguous - “sounds like” comparisons depends a lot on whether the reader is Scottish, English, or American so that readers may be left wondering how many words are pronounced. Finally, while I'm certainly very sympathetic to the overall narrative of the tragic disregard for Scots as a serious idiom of study and promotion, there are moments when readers more familiar with sociolinguistics or of the histories of language and nationalism will find themselves uneasy to encounter extremely curt dismissals of any more troubling connections of the latter, and strange occasional passages (not uniform, as the author is more careful in some places than in others) where Scots is treated as special thanks to glories of Scotland's past, over and above languages/dialects within Scotland (Doric) or beyond (Northumbrian) etc. Languages are dialects and dialects are languages as he says, until they aren't, as he suggests elsewhere speaking of unbroken continuum's and the like. The deeply contested terrain here is not always carefully dealt with by highly normative tone of this work on Scots.