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Last week, residents of Scotland voted not to break away from the U.K. in a much-anticipated referendum on Scottish independence. For those of us with a special fascination with culture and language, the vote called to mind another much-less-heralded referendum on Scottish independence that happened three short years ago. In this case, though, the verdict went the other way.

On August 21, 2011, a Wikipedian with the username Chzz proposed the deletion of the version of the encyclopedia written in Scots, calling the Scottish-language Wikipedia a "joke project," unworthy of the Wikipedia community's resources.

Scots, Chzz argued, "isn't a real language; it's English, written in a semblance of a specific pronounced dialect." What next, the user went on to ask, a Wikipedia in Cockney?

The publication of the King James Bible was among the events that diminished Scots' standing as a literary tongue in Scotland. Jemimus/Flickr hide caption

The publication of the King James Bible was among the events that diminished Scots' standing as a literary tongue in Scotland.

Chzz's proposal was met almost instantly with vociferous opposition. "It's a real language with 200,000 native speakers," wrote user Ron Ritzman. A user named Seb az86556 spoke up in ironic support of the proposal, adding, "And close French wikipedia as a barbarous Latin spoken by savages."

The opposition won out handily, and the Scots Wikipedia remains independent of its English-language cousin. "Walcome tae Wikipaedia," says the greeting on the site, "the free encyclopaedia that awbody can eedit."

Linguists would recognize the battle over Scots as another in a long line of skirmishes about language that are far more political than linguistic. Here in the U.S., for example, witness the constant skirmishes over African-American Vernacular English. My colleague Gene Demby reminded me of the widely-quoted adage: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." And like those battles over AAVE, the dispute over Scots is laden with matters of politics and socioeconomics.

As the snippet of written Scots from Wikipedia suggests, much of written Scots is intelligible to readers of English. If you're unfamiliar with the language variety, go ahead, click around the site for a minute. (Try this featured article on the assassination attempt on former President Ronald Reagan, for example.) Chances are you'll be able to parse a good amount of it, and it may even strike you as a transcription of Scottish-accented English. ("Scottish people are quite able to use the English Wikipedia with proper spelling," said a Wikipedian in support of closing the Scots Wikipedia, "instead of trying to capture their accents through phonetic transcription.")

There are good reasons why written Scots gives this impression, but to understand them, you'll have to understand a little of the history of Scots.

Read more:

A Forgotten Referendum On The Union Of Scots And English