Tongue-tied

It is astonishing how different the conclusions from one article can be. When Lesley Riddoch quoted Unesco as saying literacy was "the ability to use printed materials" and followed with the sentence "firstly there's Scots..." (Opinion, 1 March) my hope was that she was about to discuss the importance of the full restoration of formal Scots in written form. She did not grasp the nettle, but concluded Scots was probably "not speaking properly".

This is a pity, for it encourages the opposite reactions, like that of Norman Murphy, who reiterates the view that Scots is no longer a language as Gaelic is. This will be seen as a nonsense when a full Scots canon is commonly known.

IAIN WD FORDE

Main Street

Scotlandwell, Kinross-shire

Here we go again. For Norman DH Murphy (Letters, 2 March), the Scots leid, "an increasingly debased dialect, over-rich in glottal stops", can be reduced to "semi-literate, grunting, incoherent" noises.

The reality is that it shouldn't matter whether Scots is a bona fide language (as I believe it is) or the mere dialect Mr Murphy and his too numerous ilk call it (usually with a sneer: what matters is that it is a means of communication, in all its variants and registers.

English as we know it is, after all, a dialect, albeit that of authority. We've got used to it, given it the status of "standard", but it is of no greater intrinsic value than its regional variants. There's barely a language in Europe that isn't basically a dialect.

AONGHAS MACNEACAIL

Carlops

Peeblesshire