Scots - creole or not?

Question

Can Lowland Scots be considered creole? It developed from Middle English, but is it just an offshoot or did it develop from some kind of pidgin (between Scots and English probably)?

Answer 1

Yes and No. I did an essay on this about twenty years ago for uni linguistics.

Middle scots and Modern Lallans / Lowlands Scots like Modern English developed from Old English.

Lallans Scots however while not an actual "Creole" shows some signs of partial creolization.

It is of note that Gaelic loan words into Lowlands Scots follow a pattern that suggest they replace loan words from the northern form of Old Welsh called Cymric.

Scots also has semantic differences. Loan words form Old Norse Latin and French have different words to the same owrds when borrowed into English.

Lallans Scots and English have been continually interchanged words as they are both part of the  dialect continuum of British English.

Just to complicate matters further the Scots English dialect which is not quite the same thing as Scots borrows words from Lallans and  borrows from Gaelic in a different way than Lallans does Gaelic !

Creole No Partial creolization Yes.