My understanding has alwas been that Scots was a dialect of English, heavily influenced in some places by Scots Gaelic. When I used to travel to Scotland on business, I would sometimes have to get a Scots-to-Englsih translation if the brogue was too thick, but for the most part I could understand anything said. One young lass with whom I worked (and avery attractive ad charming lass she was) said of one fellow on the team, "I can't understand him half the time either."

Public televion did an excellent History of the Language series years ago which included a segment called, "The Guid Scots Tonge." Their take was that it is a dialect of English as well.

I think of how we in the South (US) speak our own form of English dialect, and I have noted how some "foreigners" (folks from the North) have trouble understanding us when we are engaged in our own local converstion. I think it's the same. We have a lot of words and rhythms that are heavily influence by Gaelic due to the Scots and Scots-Irish migrations, and we also have other words that just aren't used elsewhere. Southerners are big on similes.

It took my brother-in-law years to get where he could understand us in a crowd.

But we still speak English, just not the Queen's English. But as a comedian once said, the queen doesn't run the South.

One example: some very rural folks still say something that sounds like " I hope him get his hay in." The word that sounds like hope is actually is actually a variant of a very old conjugation of help, i.e., holp which is a past tense of help. I would say "I helped him get his hay in."

But then, that assumes that I was still capable of walking through the fields picking up bales and stacking them on the trailer behind the hay baler, a possiblity which is questionable at best! I would have trouble getting all the hay out of my kilt!