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Like I said in the title, I am aware that Scots is a sister language of Modern English. I am also aware that Frisian diverged from west Germanic, making it and it's modern variants sister languages, but is there a language, dead or alive, that diverged after Latin and the romantic languages influenced English(middle English)?

Edit: Made the question clearer.

Edit: There's some confusion with the definition of dialect vs language. I would assume the definition in this case would be a language that diverged from English between the early late English period to the late middle English period.

Aaron Speedy
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  • At the risk of offending many Scottish people I would regard Scots (as opposed to Scottish Gaelic) and Modern British English as dialects of the same language rather than as separate languages. There are many words in Scots which are different from English but the sentence structure is pretty much the same and I can usually understand Scots at least as well as I can understand, say, the Tyneside dialect. Before I would regard Scots as a different language linguistically rather than culturally I would need to see an authoritative definition of when two dialects diverge into separate languages. – BoldBen Sep 13 '21 at 06:53
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    There's no authoritative difference between dialect and language, and it's something linguists will debate endlessly over particular cases, but there are no obvious candidates other than Scots that aren't extinct (are you accepting extinct languages?). It's also not very clear exactly when Scots diverged, whether it was late Old English or early Middle English. And literary 16th century Scots was very different from current Scots due to the English influence. This is not something for a short answer but Wikipedia has a lot of info e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_language – Stuart F Sep 13 '21 at 07:58
  • If you're interested in knowing more about Scots including its history and relation to English, as well as what people don't know about its history, the best reference online is probably the material with the Dictionars o the Scots Leid – Stuart F Sep 13 '21 at 08:03
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    Scots (Lallans) is at the extreme end of the English dialect continuum, and it's not unreasonable to consider it a separate language. As John McWhorter puts it: "Dialects are all there is. Language is a political term". – John Lawler Sep 13 '21 at 16:32
  • @StuartF Very interesting. And yes, I should've specified in my question that I'm looking for both extinct and alive languages. – Aaron Speedy Sep 13 '21 at 22:54
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    Refer to the taxonomy of Anglic languages, all languages that have been used on the British Isles and may be considered a kind of English. It presents a view that Scots is not as much a language separate from English, but more so a member of a dialect continuum. Scots may never have diverged from the other dialects in a complete sense, as you suggest, but rather evolved alongside them, changing in many of the same ways and from the same pressures. – brainchild Sep 14 '21 at 01:15
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    For more info see Why Frisian – Mitch Sep 14 '21 at 01:22
  • Note also that formally a sister language of English is any of the Indo-European family, which includes hundreds of extant languages and many more extinct ones. Also, I am not sure that there has been any single time when Latin influenced English, as opposed to such influence being a continuous process, though the Norman Invasion was the period of most rapid influence. I think it is unclear exactly what end your question is trying to reach. – brainchild Sep 14 '21 at 01:38
  • @epl I guess there is no language closer to English than Frisian or, debatably, Scots. I think that most everyone knows what I'm trying to say, which is a language that developed different features/words than English after or during the Norman Invasion. Definitions can get really controversial sometimes. Thank you for the Wikipedia pages though. I really like what StuartF said about dialects though. I guess my question was kind of a vague one. – Aaron Speedy Sep 14 '21 at 02:54
  • What others have indicated is that language differences within a family occur on a continuum. Scots and English may be different languages, by some accounts, but if the Northern English dialect has more in common with Scots than with a Southern English dialect, as suggested by the article, then it might be more helpful to consider all three as simply dialects of English. Also, since all were spoken over a region of continuous settlement, they probably underwent many of the same changes over time, much like "telephone" entering similarly into British and American English. – brainchild Sep 14 '21 at 06:32
  • There was no point in time when Scots and English became separate languages, or any agreement that they have ever been separate languages. – brainchild Sep 14 '21 at 06:36
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    Frisian is the closest extant language to English that may not reasonably be considered a dialect or variation of English. The divergence occurred during the Germanic invasion of Britain. English appears to be roughly a derivative of various Germanic dialects, prominently Saxon ones, heavily modified by local innovations, and important events such as the Norman Invasion, the Great Vowel Shift, and others. – brainchild Sep 14 '21 at 06:44

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According to this chart, the sister language to English is Frisian...

chart

Conclusion: unless you precisely define what the term "sister language" means, there is no way to answer.

GEdgar
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    The clarification given is that a "sister language" is to be understood as a language descended from Middle English but not included in Modern English. (Other definitions of the same term are more expansive.) – brainchild Sep 14 '21 at 00:58