World Language Map

Where is Scots spoken?

Scots (Scots leid) is an Indo-European language, spoken in the United Kingdom. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Scots is spoken

Scots is spoken in one country: the United Kingdom. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
United Kingdom2.5%1,711,478

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

Scots has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Scots?

Wikidata gives about 99,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2011). It also lists about 1.5 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Scots sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Scots as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Germanic
  4. Northwest Germanic
  5. West Germanic
  6. North Sea Germanic
  7. Anglo-Frisian
  8. Anglic
  9. Later Anglic
  10. Scots

More about Scots

Codes: ISO 639-3 sco, Glottolog scot1243. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Scots

Where is Scots spoken?

Scots is spoken in the United Kingdom. Unicode CLDR puts it at 2.5% of the population of United Kingdom, which is about 1,711,478 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Scots?

Wikidata gives about 99,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2011). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 1.5 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue).

Which language family is Scots in?

Glottolog places Scots in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Germanic, Northwest Germanic, West Germanic, North Sea Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, Anglic and Later Anglic.

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