Scottish people

• 1. Introduction

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  Scottish people, known in their own tongue as Albannaich, carry a name whose origins stretch back to a time when Ireland, not Scotland, was called Scotia. The Venerable Bede, writing in the early 8th century, used the Latin word Scottorum to describe a people from Ireland who settled on the western edge of what would become Scotland. The word had nothing to do with the misty highlands that most people picture today. It referred to the Gaels of Dál Riata, a kingdom straddling the sea between Ireland and Britain.

  How a name that once meant Irish became the name for an entirely different nation is one of history's quiet transformations. By 1005, an Irish king was calling himself Imperator Scottorum. By the time of King Edgar in the late 11th century, the title Basileus Scottorum appeared on the royal seal of Scotland. The word had migrated across the water and taken root.

  But what is a Scot, exactly? That question has no single answer. Scotland was built from Picts and Gaels, from Angles who brought the ancestor of the English language, from Norman nobles who arrived not as conquerors but by invitation. The Viking-descended Norse-Gaels of the Western Isles joined only in the 13th century; the Norse of the Northern Isles came even later, in the 15th. The nation that eventually called itself Scotland was centuries in the making, and the people it produced scattered across the globe in numbers that dwarf the population of Scotland itself.

• 2. A Nation Built From Many Peoples

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  In the 9th century, the Picts and Gaels merged to found the Kingdom of Scotland, also called Alba. For two centuries after that, Celtic-speaking Cumbrians from Strathclyde and Germanic-speaking Angles from Northumbria were folded into the kingdom. The Angles had settled along the southeastern strip of Scotland, a region running from the Firth of Forth south to the River Tweed, and their language, Old English, was the ancestor of what eventually became known as Scots.

  The Davidian Revolution of the 12th century added another layer. When David I returned from exile in England in 1113 and assumed the throne in 1124, he brought Anglo-Norman military power with him and used it. He invited Anglo-Norman families from France and England to settle on lands he granted them, spreading a loyal ruling class across Scotland in the manner of European feudalism. Unlike England, where the Normans arrived through conquest, in Scotland they came by invitation. Historian Stuart Macdonald has noted that many of the common Scottish family names traceable today, including the Stewarts, Bruces, Hamiltons, Wallaces and Melvilles, reach back to this Norman influx.

  Historian Susan Reynolds has argued that since the Middle Ages, political pressures pushed writers and orators to paper over this ethnic complexity. Poets such as Blind Harry, working in the 15th and 16th centuries, constructed terms like "trew Scottis" to flatten differences between the groups. A 1974 International Political Science Association report still found it necessary to distinguish between the Anglo-Saxon peoples of the Scottish Lowlands and the Celtic peoples of the Highlands. Historian Steven L. Danver, writing in 2014, put it plainly: Lowland Scots and Highland Scots differ from one another ethnically, culturally and linguistically. It was Germanic settlers of Anglian origin who gradually occupied all of the Lowlands, while the Highlands remained Celtic. Sociologist Ian Carter found, from research into marriage patterns, that little intermarrying occurred between the two groups across the period spanning the 16th to the 18th centuries.

• 3. Language and the Shifting Word

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  Scots, the Germanic language of the Lowlands, has an origin that few would guess: it descends from Northern Middle English. After the wars of independence, the English spoken by Lowland Scots diverged from the English spoken in the south. From 1424 onward, the Parliament of Scotland used this language, which its speakers called Inglis, in its official statutes. By the middle of the 15th century, the name had shifted; the language was now called Scottis.

  The Reformation that began in 1560 dealt a quiet blow to Scots. Scotland's new Protestant Presbyterian church, lacking a translation of the Bible in Scots, turned to the Geneva Edition. As a result, God spoke English, and the prestige of Scots in written form began to drain away. By the end of the 17th century, Scots had effectively ceased to exist as a literary language. Yet it survived in daily speech, and today over 1.5 million people in Scotland still use Scots as a spoken language. About 30,000 Ulster Scots speakers use a form called Ullans, which was recognised alongside Scots as a variety of the Scots language by the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages in 1993.

  Scottish Gaelic followed a slower but equally dramatic trajectory. Gaelic had reached nearly every corner of Scotland by the 9th century and held its peak between the 11th and 13th centuries. Its retreat began in the 13th century. The Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries actively suppressed its use and drove speakers to emigrate to Canada or relocate to the industrial cities of the Lowlands. A report by the Registrar General for Scotland in 2005, drawing on the 2001 census, found about 92,400 people, or 1.9% of Scotland's population, able to speak Gaelic. Moray, once a traditionally Gaelic-speaking region, had its Gaelic replaced by the Doric dialect of Scots by the 19th century. The Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005 reflects the Scottish Parliament's effort to reverse the decline.

• 4. The Great Dispersal

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  Around 40 million people worldwide claim Scottish ancestry today, a figure that dwarfs Scotland's own population of just over five million. The movements that produced this diaspora were often driven by hardship: the Highland Clearances, the Lowland Clearances, the Highland Potato Famine, and later industrial decline and unemployment. Canada holds the highest concentration of Scottish descendants per capita anywhere in the world.

  Australia felt Scottish immigration in waves of striking intensity. By 1830, Scots made up 15.11% of the colonies' non-Aboriginal population. That share rose to 20-25% by mid-century. During the Australian Gold Rush of the 1850s alone, 90,000 Scots arrived, outnumbering arrivals from other parts of Britain or Ireland at the time. Literacy rates among these Scottish immigrants ran at 90-95%. By 1860, Scots made up fully half the ethnic composition of Western Victoria, Adelaide, Penola and Naracoorte. The 2021 Australian census counted 130,060 residents born in Scotland and 2,176,777 claiming Scottish ancestry, making it the fourth most commonly nominated ancestry and accounting for over 8.4% of the population.

  New Zealand received approximately 20% of its original European settler population from Scotland. In the 1961 census, 47,078 New Zealand residents had been born in Scotland. By 2013 that figure had fallen to 25,953. The South Island city of Dunedin was named as a tribute to Edinburgh by its Scottish founders and remains a symbol of that heritage. Well over 100 Caledonian societies had formed by the early 20th century, organising annual Caledonian Games from the 1860s onward to maintain Scottish culture and ease integration.

  In the United States, the picture is vast and contested. The 2000 census recorded 4.8 million Americans self-reporting Scottish ancestry. Over 4.3 million reported Scotch-Irish ancestry, bringing the combined self-reported figure to 9.2 million. Demographers consider these counts massive under-reports, partly because Scottish ancestry is disproportionately under-reported among people of mixed descent, and partly because many whose forebears were Scottish Protestants reported simply as "American." Estimates for Americans with Scottish ancestry range from 9 to 25 million. The Scotch-Irish, whose origins lay in Lowland Scotland and Northern England before a generation in Ulster and then a crossing to North America in the 18th century, are estimated at 27 to 30 million. Several Presidents of the United States, including Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Donald Trump, whose mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was born in Tong on the Isle of Lewis, have claimed Scottish or Scotch-Irish roots.

• 5. Scots Across Europe

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  Scotland's relationship with the European continent is older and stranger than most people realise. The first Scots mentioned in Russia's written history were Scottish soldiers in Muscovy, noted as early as the 14th century. Among those soldiers of fortune was an ancestor of the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, a man called George Learmonth. Under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, a roster of Scots achieved wealth and renown in Russian service: Admiral Thomas Gordon as Commander-in-Chief of Kronstadt, Samuel Greig, Charles Baird, Charles Cameron and Adam Menelaws among them. The Scottish physician James Wylie became the best-known of several doctors to the Russian court.

  In Poland, the Scottish presence ran deeper still. From the mid-16th century onward, Scots traders and settlers were common enough that a "Scotch Pedlar's Pack in Poland" became a proverbial phrase, referring to the cloths, woollen goods, tin utensils and ironware that itinerant Scots sold. King Stephen's Royal Grant of 1576 gave Scottish immigrants royal protection, and a district in Kraków was set aside for them. Records from 1592 show Scots being granted citizenship of Kraków; fees ranged from 12 Polish florins to a musket and gunpowder, or a promise to marry within a year and a day. By the 17th century, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Scots lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, many from Dundee and Aberdeen. In 1691 the City of Warsaw elected a Scottish immigrant, Aleksander Czamer, as its mayor.

  In Italy, a Scottish community in Rome had grown large enough by 1592 to warrant its own church: Sant'Andrea degli Scozzesi, built to serve the Scottish expatriate community and especially those studying for the priesthood. Pope Paul V handed the adjoining hospice to the Jesuits in 1615. The church gained further importance when James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, set up residence in Rome in 1717. After deconsecration in 1962, the building was incorporated into a bank. Elsewhere in Italy, the village of Gurro claims descent from Scottish soldiers who, fleeing the Battle of Pavia, were trapped by blizzards and settled permanently. The town still has a Scottish museum.

  In the Netherlands, trade links preceded settlement. Scots congregated first in Campvere, where they could land goods duty-free and govern their own affairs, then in Rotterdam, where Scottish and Dutch Calvinism coexisted comfortably from the 17th century. The Scots House in the town of Veere, now a museum, was the only place outside Scotland where Scots Law was ever practised. In Rotterdam, the doors of the Scots International Church have remained open since 1643.

• 6. Names, Faith, and Anglicisation

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  Scottish surnames carry centuries of linguistic history in their spelling. The Mac prefix, meaning "son of," appears throughout Gaelic names, sometimes shortened to Mc. MacAoidh becomes Mackay in English; MacGill-Eain becomes MacLean. Surnames like Wallace and Morton derive from parts of Scotland settled by non-Gaelic peoples. Even the most common Scottish surnames, Smith and Brown, carry multiple origins: Smith can be a translation of the Gaelic Mac a' Ghobhainn, and Brown can refer to the colour or be related to MacBrayne.

  Future British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, in his 1921 book Socialism: Critical and Constructive, expressed alarm at what he called the Anglification of Scotland: "The Anglification of Scotland has been proceeding apace to the damage of its education, its music, its literature, its genius, and the generation that is growing up under this influence is uprooted from its past, and, being deprived of the inspiration of its nationality, is also deprived of its communal sense."

  In religion, Christianity has shaped Scottish life for over 1,400 years. In the 2011 census, 53.8% of the Scottish population identified as Christian, split between Protestant and Catholic traditions. About 14.4% identified as Catholic according to the 2014 Scottish Household Survey. The Church of Scotland, the main Protestant body, is Presbyterian. Yet by 2016, the Social Scottish Attitudes research found that 52% of Scottish people identified as having no religion at all, a figure that sits in tension with the centuries-deep Christian tradition. The Protestant-Catholic divide, meanwhile, retains social weight, particularly in Ulster, where the colonial policies of James VI planted a Presbyterian Scottish society through the Plantation of Ulster, forming the Ulster-Scots community whose descendants number in the millions.