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The Scottish language is under threat.
According to UNESCO half the planet’s several thousand languages,
dialects and creoles will all but disappear by 2050. Yet an unlikely
saviour towards preserving the Scottish spoken and written word has
emerged. Also other languages when, unfortunately, too many to number
will fall by the digital wayside.
Coming to the rescue is a nascent artificial intelligence. Despite the
Information Age being viewed as a key contributory factor leading to a
global linguistic culling. Novel research carried out by me over a
matter of months reveals the Scottish language is set fair to actually
strengthen its position as the century evolves in tandem with digital’s
still relatively new cousin AI.
Fortunately, the Scottish language is endowed with an enviable
versatility. Embracing innumerable inflections and cadences takes in the
Gaelic, Highland, Doric, Borders, Celtic, Ulster Scots and English
influences. Add the Auld Alliance and other standout universal strengths
heightened by Scotland's global influence through the Age of
Enlightenment (1687-1789).
Fast forward two centuries and frontrunners of the information age are
"Digital Natives" - born since 1980-81 - whip-cybersmart Millennials and
Generation Z and Alphas. I was surprised to discover, they number at
least TWO MILLION in Scotland alone who are making the language their
own. Multiple that globally!!
With Gen Beta, born between 2025-2039 expected to be fully AI integrated
and instrumental in further linguistically shaping the mid-21st century
onwards.
Reddit's online forum notes a significant move by the Oxford English
Dictionary lately giving Scottish language-flavoured internet and social
media words a wider platform: "not necessarily listing new words but old
words".
There's no stopping such cyber savvy individuals with online activity
centred on software applications (apps) continuing to grow
exponentially, as they juggle an ever-increasing number of acronyms and
abbreviated terms.
Endlessly microblogging, texting and sharing photos on social media
platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) and
innumerable other connected channels.
Digital Natives are increasingly taking on board Scottish expressions,
terms and idioms once regularly found in playground slang and beyond
applying social forms and acronyms.
Significantly they’re also being re-applied formally by the global
technology sector to explain out often highly-complex online practices
and tools, software apps, and IT solutions.
A wee cluster - a digital snapshot, if you like - highlighted below is
representative of scores-upon-scores of other examples aplenty I have
unearthed:
Doot - Dictionary.com 2025 word of the year prominent in general
internet culture
Ussy - American Dialect Society word of the year 2022
Tattie Bogle - Refers to old, obsolete technology
Hi Heid Yin - Metaphor applied to tech leadership
Totie - TikTok term for texting byte-sized shorthand meanings
Curling - Refers to creating computer text curved or shaped used
in digital designs, printables, word art in common programs Word,
Photoshop, Canva laden with built-in effects from sites like Etsy
Loch - Computer science key concept prevents simultaneous, often
damaging, access to data by multiple threads of execution
Haar - Digital signal processing and computer vision specifically
related to mathematical algorithms
Polis - Open-source software and realtime AI-powered systems
analysing public opinion
Tioraidh - From the Gaelic for goodbye pronounced cheery, Digital
Native partlance as in "Ta-Ra Bro" and "Cheery-Bye, Dude"
It's clear that the sheer vernacular power of Scotland's spoken and
written word continues on the rise in computational linguistics and
language in terms of the application of syntax, grammar and phonetics.
Please Read On.. |
