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MAY I take issue with a passing comment in Richard Walker’s excellent article: his statement that the people who argue that the Scots tongue is not a language but a dialect are “quite entitled to hold that view” (Celebrating our culture can beat Scottish cringe, January 21). It is true that the linguistic status of Scots is ambivalent, but this does not mean that it is a mere matter of opinion. There is no simple binary distinction between “language” and “dialect”: the status of a speech-form depends on a large number of factors. It would be perfectly possible to argue that Czech and Slovak are dialects of the same language; the tongues heard on either side of the border between Germany and the Netherlands are so similar that it is meaningless to suggest that they change from dialects of German to dialects of Dutch when we cross the political frontier. The very points that supposedly show Scots to be a dialect of English equally well suggest that Gaelic is a dia

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