US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia (2020)

I'd be interested in an in-depth write up from some academic who actually studies the scots language, rather than a reddit comment and a bunch of journalists trying to make clickbait.

The Scots language as a concept is a bit slippery since it's so close to standard English on the one hand, and there's quite distinct sub-dialects too.

In practical terms, it's a bit like writing a wikipedia in "Southern American" or "AAVE", you're duplicating the content of the shared us/gb english wikipedia, so you can mabye use "y'all" and other local terminology but if you go all out it'll sound like a parody, and if you don't then why would you bother in the first place?

edit: this article is at least by a local journalist, and seems useful:

"A stramash hits Scots language Wikipedia"

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18678238.issue-day-stram...

> Once Scotland’s official language, since 1707, Lowland Scotland has been experiencing a linguistic phenomenon known as ‘diglossia’: where Scots rapidly switch between two languages. One language is taken as the prestigious ‘high tongue’ suitable for literature, education and the arts; and other is perceived as common speak suitable only for casual conversation. Some among us can still remember being hit by their teachers for not talking ‘proper’, and despite being as different as Danish is to Swedish, many still scoff at the idea of a legitimate Scots language. As a result of centuries under attack, Scots is losing its uniqueness and may be at risk of total assimilation into English.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_s...

Has some useful stuff. An initial read through finds that it's fairly minor disagreements being blown out of proportion. First one I clicked was is "football (soccer) spelt 'fitba' or 'fitbaw', which are both given as alternatives in scottish dictionaries, but the American teenager preferred 'fitbaw'.

This is on the same level as should email have a hyphen. It's great that Wikipedia has people that worry about style guide stuff like that, but it's wrong to suggest it's full of basic mistakes if it decides to use one you don't like.

The other common example seems like a genuine mistake, but might just be a find and replace error.

A healthy national language movement would promptly give the kid a scholarship

They want this to be about shitting on this kid but I think it's more interesting to use it to think about the Scottish nationalist project