Politics and dialect.

There is a dialect of English known as Ulster Scots. Even though it's just a slang dialect, it has become an official language. How comes?

Well, before Northern Ireland's government was suspended, they had time to do lots of really stupid arguing at the taxpayers' expense. Sinn Fein insisted that all Stormont's paperwork had to be produced in Irish as well as English. This wasn't for practical reasons — no-one in Northern Ireland speaks Irish unless they've gone out of their way to learn it — it was just to make a cheap point: "Look! We produce documents in Irish, so we must be Irish. That's logic, that is." Well, the Unionists couldn't think of any sensible grounds to oppose the move (when local councils produce all their literature in Urdu, who can object to Irish?), so they decided to sabotage it instead: "If our literature is to be produced in the language of the South, it should also be produced in the language of the North!" What, you mean English? No, that'd never work politically: the Unionists needed some sort of concession to match the concession they were giving the Nationalists, and demanding something that is already happening isn't much of a concession. So they went for Ulster Scots, and the Nationalists okayed it and sat back and smirked.

Not one single person in Northern Ireland thinks that Ulster Scots is actually a language. I doubt that anyone who speaks it would ever dream of writing an official letter to their solicitor in it, any more than a Cockney would start an official letter with "Awwight, me ol' china?" Yet the Northern Irish Executive now employ a translator to render all their official documentation into slang, which no-one will ever read. This tells you a lot about why government is a bad idea. But, hey, if a bunch of paperwork in a joke language is what it takes to bring us peace, it's cheap at the price. The Northern Irish have a good excuse for this silliness. Not so the Scots.

Ulster Scots comes, as you might guess, from Scotland. People from the West of Scotland migrated to Northern Ireland, taking their English slang with them. A lot of Scots call this slang "Scots" and claim that it's a language. But it's not a language: it's just English, with a few quirky words and expressions thrown in, and a load of phonetic spelling. Example: "wean" means "child". Oo, you might think, that's an interesting word. Well, no it isn't. "Wee" means "little" and "wean" is just a way of writing "wee un", meaning, obviously, "little one". It's not a word, any more than "saaf" is a Londonese word meaning "south". There is a difference between speaking a different language and attempting to spell a strong accent. People from Surrey pronounce "trousers" as "trizes", but they still spell it as "trousers". If anyone were to start spelling it "trizes" and claiming that it's part of a language distinct to Surrey and separate from English, everyone would just look at them odd. Because the English, like the Northern Irish, don't have a giant chip on their shoulder.

And so Mr Hinkley brings us to this idiocy:

The Scottish Pairlament is here for tae represent aw Scotland's folk.

We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as can is able tae find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament dis and whit wey it warks. We hae producit information anent the Pairlament in a reenge o different leids tae help ye tae find oot mair.

"Wey" means "way"; "reenge" means "range"; "oot" means "out"; "aw" means "all". If anyone anywhere else in the UK wrote like this, it would be called "very bad spelling"; in Scotland, it's called "our proud heritage" or possibly "oor prood heeritage". The Scottish Parliament haven't produced that site as the result of some silly political compromise: they actually take it seriously, as do most of their constituents. Sad.