One More East Slavic Parallel for the Language Situation in the Lowlands‪.‬

The language situations in the East Slavic countries present several noteworthy parallels providing new perspectives on the dialect continuum in Lowland Scotland. (1) In this respect Belarus is by no means less attractive for sociolinguistic comparisons with the Scottish Lowlands than Ukraine, which is discussed in some of my previous papers (e.g. Pavlenko 2002). Indeed, while the Ukrainian language manifests numerous close parallels with Scots as regards the pivotal points in their external history, Belorussian resembles Scots very much in its evolution of sociolinguistic status. Besides, Belorussian is somewhat closer to Russian than Ukrainian is in terms of language structure (cf. Comrie 1990: 65), making the comparisons between the former two idioms and Scots and English even more fruitful. The two mentioned pairs of languages constitute typologically similar situations characterised by bipolar continua. In both cases between the two poles (broad Scots/Standard English--Standard Belorussian/Standard Russian, correspondingly) a multitude of speech forms can be placed, some of which can in general be dubbed as 'transitional' and/or 'mixed'. Some of these varieties (especially the urban ones) are strongly stigmatised as 'spoiled' or 'degenerate'.