Dictionary of Lowland Scotch

With an Introductory Chapter on the Poetry, Humour, and Literary History of the Scottish Language and an Appendix of Scottish Proverbs

“Broad Scotch,” says Dr. Adolphus Wagner, the erudite and sympathetic editor of the Poems of Robert Burns, published in Leipzig, in 1835, “is literally broadened, — i.e., a language or dialect very worn off, and blotted, whose original stamp often is unknowable, because the idea is not always to be guessed at.” This strange mistake is not confined to the Germans, but prevails to a large extent among Englishmen, who are of opinion that Scotch is a provincial dialect ofthe English, — like that of Lancashire or Yorkshire, — and not entitled to be called a language. The truth is, that English and Lowland Scotch were originally the same, but that the literary and social influences of London as the real metropolis of both countries, especially after the transfer of the royal family of Stuart from Edinburgh to London, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, favoured the infusion of a Latin element into current English, which the Scotch were slow to adopt.

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