Italian Scots

Italian Scots or Scots-Italians are people of Italian descent living in Scotland. These terms may refer to people who are born in Scotland and of Italian descent. It can also refer to people of mixed Scottish and Italian descents. A recent Italian voter census estimated that there are 70,000 to 100,000 people in Scotland of Italian descent or Italian nationals, which is up to 1.9% of the Scottish population.

The majority come from the provinces of Lucca, Frosinone and Isernia.

History

Arguably the first people from Italy to reach Scotland were the Romans in and around 40, although the modern nation of Italy did not exist at the time and of course the Roman Empire was a cosmopolitan institution, with some Roman Emperors from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. Still, the Romans were for the most part from what is now Italy and they did leave their mark on Scotland in the shape of Hadrian's Wall, Antonine Wall and other monumental constructions, although it was not until the end of the 19th century that an Italian-Scots identity really began to take shape.

Scots

Scots may refer to:

SCOTS may refer to:

See also

Scottish people

The Scottish people (Scots: Scots Fowk, Scottish Gaelic: Albannaich), or Scots, are a nation and socially defined ethnic group resident in Scotland. Historically, they emerged from an amalgamation of two groups—the Picts and Gaels—who founded the Kingdom of Scotland (or Alba) in the 9th century, and thought to have been ethnolinguistically Celts. Later, the neighbouring Cumbrian Britons, who also spoke a Celtic language, as well as Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons and Norse, were incorporated into the Scottish nation.

In modern use, "Scottish people" or "Scots" is used to refer to anyone whose linguistic, cultural, family ancestral or genetic origins are from within Scotland. The Latin word Scotti originally referred to the Gaels but came to describe all inhabitants of Scotland. Though sometimes considered archaic or pejorative, the term Scotch has also been used for the Scottish people, though this usage is current primarily outside Scotland.

There are people of Scottish descent in many countries other than Scotland. Emigration, influenced by factors such as the Highland and Lowland Clearances, Scottish participation in the British Empire, and latterly industrial decline and unemployment, resulted in Scottish people being found throughout the world. Large populations of Scottish people settled the new-world lands of North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. There is a Scottish presence at a particularly high level in Canada, which has the highest level per-capita of Scots descendants in the world and second largest population of descended Scots ancestry after the United States. They took with them their Scottish languages and culture.

Scots language

Scots is the Anglic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster (where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots). It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language which was historically restricted to most of the Highlands, the Hebrides and Galloway after the Middle Ages.

Because there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots and particularly its relationship to English. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects do exist, these often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, yet it has its own distinct dialects. Alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way Norwegian is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish.