Last year Lallans, the Scots Language Society's magazine for writing in Scots, celebrated 21 years of publication with an anthology entitled Mak it New. It joined a surprisingly large number of Scots titles released in 1995. Lallans even complained: Mair an mair buiks is nou be-in publisht in Scots an the'r sair want o space it review them aw. While this is perhaps an exaggeration, the number of Scots publications still being relatively small, it does reflect a significant change in the status of Scots since Lallans first started in 1973.

The early seventies saw the first mainstream expressions of political nationalism in Scotland. Although the Scottish National Party has always been strangely weak on cultural matters (its main arguments for autonomy being then, as now, focused on economics) there was was discussion on the possible role of Scots and Gaelic in the new parliament which was just round the corner. This debate rumbled on through the seventies but was undermined by the poor public image of Scots. It was hard to imagine the language of the Sunday Post's Broons and TV's Parliamo Glasgow being employed in any serious official context.

The 1979 devolution disaster at first seemed a body blow for all aspects of Scottish culture but in fact turned out quite the opposite. The clear political divide between Scotland and England and a growing awareness of the value of indigenous cultures encouraged many Scottish artists to reject British cultural norms. In the early eighties European plays (of Moliere, Goldini, etc) were translated directly into Scots and many new works appeared in a variety of dialects. Scots began to have a status.

Suddenly there seemed to be a market for Scots material. In 1983 the New Testament in Scots was an unexpected success and in 1985 the initial 15,000 print run for the Concise Dictionary of Scots sold out within days. Books on local dialect, such as The Patter were also best-sellers. In 1986 Billy Kay's highly successful BBC Radio and TV series Scots: The Mither Tongue brought the whole issue to a wider audience.

It was becoming intolerable that Scots should remain shut out of primary schools, especially as there was already recognition of other non-English languages such as Gaelic, Cantonese, and Urdu. The major breakthrough came in June 1991 when the Scottish Office Education Department (SED) published is guidelines English Language 5-14. Suddenly a language whose use in schools had been actively discouraged for a century received the official stamp of approval.

The first tasks of schools are to enable pupils to be confident and creative in this language...Scottish writing and writing about Scotland should permeate the curriculum and be introduced at an early stage, taking its place beside English literature.

By 1993, encouraged by the SED, every Scottish Education Authority became involved in the Scottish Languages Project. One of the major outcomes of the project, The Kist, an anthology of work in both Scots and Gaelic with associated teaching materials, tapes and videos was published early this year. This was closely followed by The Scots School Dictionary which offers a standard orthography and vocabulary. Moreover, Dumfries and Galloway Region, Grampian and Tayside have already been introducing Scots into primary schools, the last reporting ..absolutely no resistance to the resource material - in fact it has been a sell-out. So Scottish teachers and parents are slowly coming round to the view that the ability to speak Scots is an enriching bilingualism, not an employment barrier. In addition to reclaiming our own culture, 'having' Scots allows a deeper understanding of language itself.

An important consequence of all this activity is that a number of small publishing houses such as the Scottish Children's Press in Aberdeen and Argyll Publishing are now producing material in Scots for schools. And the integration of Scots is being pushed at all levels of Scottish education. Edinburgh University is also setting up a Scots language degree and already has a Scots 1 course. This is an introduction to the study of the languages of Lowland Scotland (including regional, social and literary manifestations) past and present. Glasgow University is increasing its emphasis on Scots literature and is keen to teach it as a language with its own vocabulary. It currently runs a course on Scottish Language & Literature covering Scottish poetry, fiction and drama. It includes a study of the history of the lowland Scots language since the 14th century and covers the present-day resurgence in contemporary Scottish writing. (However as a balance check out the number of insipid identikit English Language courses which festoon the prospectuses of Scottish universities.) Alongside this official activity, the Aberdeen Universitie Scots Leid Quorum is building a network of university-based Quorums.

Education is the insurance policy of the language, but equally important is the parallel activity to encourage more use of Scots in mainstream media. In 1993 the Perth-based Scottish Language Resource Centre was set up to act as an information exchange and has been 'overwhelmed by the response both at home and abroad'. Alongside this significant development is the work of the lobbying organisations, the long-established Scots Language Society was joined in 1994 by the more irreverent Scots Tung campaign. Both encourage and support speakers' groups.

In the last year Scots has appeared in a number of TV programs such as Scottish Men, Scottish Voices and Cracking Stories, Grant's Whisky used Scots in a series of adverts and even the beleaguered Scottish Conservative Party realised the power of Scots in their infamous advert Tartan Tax - Nae Jobs.

However the battle is not won just yet. We have a long, long way to go before Scots has any kind of equality with English and the idea of a Catalan-style rebirth of Scots as an official language is some way off, to say the least. Moreover, for many of those who like to think of themselves as cultured metropolitans, Scots is still dogged in by its association with a homespun tartanised subculture. As TV personality and author Muriel Gray graphically put it in a Scotland on Sunday interview bemoaning Scottish media mediocrity at the beginning of this year, I mean, if I pick up a paper that actually has somebody speaking in Scottish patois, my buttocks clench together so close you couldn't get a credit card between them.

It would be wrong to underestimate the strength of anti-Scots prejudice despite the progress made in recent years. Indeed as Scots becomes more visible and assertive we can expect a vociferous reaction from many more 'anti-bodies'. A case book example was the bizarre attack on this site by a Scotland on Sunday columnist in August. But maybe their 'Scottish Cringe' will not win this time. As Robbie Robertson, co-ordinator of the Scottish Languages Project, wrote in 1993;

There is a growing sense of Scottish identity, of what has been lost, a feeling that things need not be as they are, that the past is not irredeemable - and, significantly, this is a feeling growing among the young.