I’ll address the side argument going on here, and then back to the original topic.

IRISH

The validity of whether or not to teach Irish is a pointless debate. It is the first national language of the country, and to suggest it be dropped in favour of other practical studies and better proficiency of English is a remnant of the thinking that helped put Irish into its present situation. Obviously the language has not been taught properly, but it has also suffered from these major problems:

Lack of money to devote to proper bilingualism: Ireland was an impoverished country for a long time and there simply wasn’t enough money to spend on language restoration. To compound this, the Gaeltachtaí were/are economically depressed regions with a very high rate of emigration, both to lands beyond and to the English-speaking regions of Ireland. I think now, perhaps, one will see things change for the better.

Social Stigma: There was/is a widespread belief that Irish was an inferior language to English. This belief not only pervaded the lower classes, but was firmly believed by most of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Interestingly, in the past this wasn’t always the case. The invading Normans were assimilated rather quickly and adopted the Irish language. Though not really documented, I’m sure many Anglo-Irish landowners actually had a working knowledge of Irish, though probably not by choice but by necessity. In fact, Elizabeth I had an ‘Englishe-Iryshe-Latin Primer’ prepared for her by Christopher Nugent! (You can see an image from this phrase book in The Irish Language by Máirtín Ó Murchú.)

Illiteracy: Though Irish was the majority language of the country (even well into the 19th Century), the British authorities installed an educational system which completely ignored this. Many Irish speakers were illiterate, so when the time finally came to officially teach Irish, there were precious few who could read and write it well. This is especially saddening as Irish is Europe’s third oldest literary language after Greek and Latin.

Irish also has the disadvantage of being up against English, the business language of the world which many non-English speakers wish to learn. Are there any advantages to learning Irish? Sure. It is the first official language of Ireland and is the ancestral language of the large Irish diaspora. It would also assist in the learning of other Celtic languages, especially Scottish Gaelic and Manx. No language is useless to learn.

SCOTS

Scots (or Lallans, the Doric, Buchan Claik, or whatever else you want to call it), has the additional disadvantage of being considered a ‘half-language’. People claim it is a peasant ‘patois’ or merely a dialect, but the only thing which truly defines a language is recognition. Now that the Scottish Parliament and the UK government have recognized Scots as a regional language, that old argument is really finished.

Some will say, “I live in Scotland, and I never hear people using those words,” but they are missing the point entirely. What organizations like Scots-Online.org or even Scots Wikipaedia are trying to do is establish a written standard for Scots, something which has occurred in the history of most languages. Scots was on its way to becoming standardized until the Act of Union in 1707. From then on, many ‘forward’ thinkers adopted English in their efforts to become what they termed “North Britons.” Obviously they didn’t succeed, but they have left the language in a difficult position.

There is also some difficulty in determining the number of speakers because many people regularly switch from English to Scottish English to Scots in the course of their day-to-day conversations. Even the Scots they do use may not include a very large vocabulary and is often erroneously regarded as slang. Only with a structured written standard, complete with dictionaries and other educational literature, can the language be properly taught.

Yes, Scots is, for the most part, is mutually intelligible to English-speakers, but many languages within a related group can make this claim. To call Scots English is to call Scottish Gaelic Irish.