Red faces as Scots website gets its words mixed up

A WEBSITE dedicated to the language of Robert Burns and run by the Scottish Government is littered with errors.

Officials have admitted the Scots language site includes words that have been mixed together and some that do not exist, such as ‘wir ha me owe rd ea in san’ and‘ feckf up ai rt ’.

One sentence on the Government website reads :‘ Scots is aaroo nu sinwir ha meow erdaeinsan it is a fur thie, feckfu pair to Scottish culture the day.’ It is thought to mean: ‘Scots is around us wherever we go, whatever we are doing, and is a vibrant part of Scottish culture today.’

Michael Hance, director of the Scots Language Centre, said: ‘It’s clearly not been edited correctly, as some words don’t mean anything. Something has got lost in translation somewhere along the line.’

Both Mr Hance and Scottish Language Dictionaries senior editor Pauline Cairns said‘ wirhame owerd ae ins an’ wa snot a Scots word.

Miss Cairns said: ‘ It’s great that the Scottish Government is promoting Scots, but this is “no richt”.

‘There’s either been an error with cutting and pasting or no Scots speaker has proof-read it once it was put up.’

A Scottish Government spokesman thanked eagle-eyed Scots speakers for bringing to its attention what he described as ‘minor formatting errors’. He added: ‘The Scots language is an essential part of our distinctive culture and heritage. We will correct these as part of a review of these pages at the earliest opportunity.’

Scots is recognised as a language by both the UK and Scottish governments.

It has many dialects including Glaswegian, Doric, Ayrshire and Shetland. In the last census, 1.5million people were recorded as regularly speaking it.