Scottish people

Historically, they emerged in the early Middle Ages from an amalgamation of two Celtic peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded the Kingdom of Scotland (or Alba) in the 9th century.

[26] In the Early Middle Ages, Scotland saw several ethnic or cultural groups mentioned in contemporary sources, namely the Picts, the Gaels, the Britons, and the Angles, with the last of these settling in the southeast of the country.

[27] Germanic peoples included the Angles of Northumbria, who settled in south-eastern Scotland in the region between the Firth of Forth to the north and the River Tweed to the south.

[29] This Davidian Revolution, as many historians call it, brought a European style of feudalism to Scotland along with an influx of people of French descent – by invitation, unlike England where it was by conquest.

To this day, many of the common family names of Scotland can trace ancestry to Normans from this period, such as the Stewarts, the Bruces, the Hamiltons, the Wallaces and the Melvilles.

From 1200 to 1500, the Early Scots language spread across the lowland parts of Scotland between Galloway and the Highland line, being used by Barbour in his historical epic The Brus in the late 14th century in Aberdeen.

[citation needed] Historian Susan Reynolds has put forward how, since the Middle Ages, there have been attempts to obfuscate the ethnic plurality of Scottish people due to the political practicalities of nation building.

[32] Academics have explored how 15th and 16th-century Scottish poets and orators, such as Blind Harry, constructed terms such as 'trew Scottis' in an effort to diminish differences between the ethnic groups living within Scotland in the popular consciousness.

During the seventh century C.E., settlers of Germanic tribes of Angles moved from Northumbria in present-day northern England and southeastern Scotland to the area around Edinburgh.

[citation needed] Several Presidents of the United States have claimed Scottish ancestry or Scotch-Irish ancestry, including James Monroe through his great-great-grandfather Patrick Andrew Monroe emigrated to America,[58] Andrew Jackson,[59] Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, whose mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, was born in Tong on the Isle of Lewis.

[60] As the third-largest ethnic group in Canada and amongst the first Europeans to settle in the country, Scottish people have made a large impact on Canadian culture since colonial times.

Gaelic was the native language of the community since its settlement in the 18th century although the number of speakers decreased as a result of English migration[clarification needed].

John Kenneth Galbraith in his book The Scotch (Toronto: MacMillan, 1964) documents the descendants of 19th-century Scottish pioneers who settled in Southwestern Ontario and affectionately referred to themselves as 'Scotch'.

The Australian Gold Rush of the 1850s provided a further impetus for Scottish migration: in the 1850s 90,000 Scots immigrated to Australia, far more than other British or Irish populations at the time.

[citation needed] A strong cultural Scottish presence is evident in the Highland Games, dance, Tartan Day celebrations, clan and Gaelic-speaking societies found throughout modern Australia.

that the first people from the Low Countries to settle in Scotland came in the wake of Maud's marriage to the Scottish king, David I, during the Middle Ages.

Besides the thousands (or, according to one estimate, over 1 million)[citation needed] of local descendants with Scots ancestry, both ports still show signs of these early alliances.

In 1656, a number of Scottish highlanders seeking opportunities abroad, emigrated to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to enlist in the Swedish Army under Charles X Gustav in his war against it.

They contributed to many charitable institutions in the host country, but did not forget their homeland; for example, in 1701 when collections were made for the restoration fund of the Marischal College, Aberdeen, Scottish settlers in Poland gave generously.

"Bonnie Prince Charlie" was half Polish, since he was the son of James Stuart, the "Old Pretender", and Clementina Sobieska, granddaughter of Jan Sobieski, King of Poland.

[93][page needed][94][failed verification][95] In 1691, the City of Warsaw elected the Scottish immigrant Aleksander Czamer (Alexander Chalmers) as its mayor.

[96] Novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz created a fictional character, Hassling-Ketling of Elgin, played by Jan Nowicki in the film Colonel Wolodyjowski.

According to local legend, Scottish soldiers fleeing the Battle of Pavia who arrived in the area were stopped by severe blizzards that forced many, if not all, to give up their travels and settle in the town.

The Norn language was spoken in the Northern Isles into the early modern period – the current Shetland and Orcadian dialects are heavily influenced by it to this day.

The predominance of Gaelic began to decline in the 13th century, and by the end of the Middle Ages, Scotland was divided into two linguistic zones, the English/Scots-speaking Lowlands and the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Galloway.

In the United States, people of Scottish and Scots-Irish descent are chiefly Protestant[citation needed], especially in the US South, with many belonging to the Baptist or Methodist churches or various Presbyterian denominations.

Both sports are governed by bodies headquartered in Scotland, the World Curling Federation and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews respectively.

Scots helped to popularise and spread the sport of association football; the first official international match was played in Glasgow between Scotland and England in 1872.

This reflected the gradual spread of English, initially in the form of Early Scots, from around the 13th century onwards, through Scotland beyond its traditional area in the Lothians.

MacDonald, MacDougal, MacAulay, Gilmore, Gilmour, MacKinley, Macintosh, MacKenzie, MacNeill, MacPherson, MacLear, MacAra, Bruce, Campbell, Fraser, Oliver, Craig, Lauder, Menzies, Stewart, Galloway and Duncan are just a few of many examples of traditional Scottish surnames.