Scottish Cant is a cant

Cant (language)

A Cant is the jargon or argot of a group, often implying its use to exclude or mislead people outside the group.-Derivation in Celtic linguistics:...

 spoken in Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 by Lowland Scottish Travellers/Gypsies

Scottish Travellers

Scottish Travellers, or the people termed loosely Gypsies and Tinkers in Scotland, consist of a number of diverse, unrelated communities, with groups speaking a variety of different languages and holding to distinct customs, histories, and traditions...

.

Classification

A certain amount of Romani

Northern Romani dialects

Northern Romani is group of dialects of the Romani language spoken in various Northern European, Central European and Eastern European countries.-Dialects:...

 words have entered Lowland Scottish Cant through intermarriage with British Romani groups, between 25-35% of Scottish Cant originates in a Romani-derived lexicon. Containing up to 50% or more Romani loan words in some groups of the central belt of Scotland, those who are Romanichal or Scottish border gypsies. Which demonstrates the intermarriage and links between Scottish travelers and English Romani populations, historically and in recent times. This is not to be confused with indigenous Highland Traveller populations who are an autochthonous

Indigenous peoples

Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as indigenous according to one of the various definitions of the term, there is no universally accepted definition but most of which carry connotations of being the "original inhabitants" of a territory....

 group of travelling people and not to be confused with British New Age Travellers

New age travellers

New Age Travellers are groups of people who often espouse New Age or hippie beliefs and travel between music festivals and fairs in order to live in a community with others who hold similar beliefs. Their transport and homes consist of vans, lorries, buses, narrowboats and caravans converted into...

. Scottish Highland Cant essentially remains a Germanic language. The Scottish Gaelic element in the dialects of Scottish Cant is put anywhere between 0.8% and 20%.

Use of archaic Scots

Scottish Cant uses numerous terms derived from Scots which are no longer current in Modern Scots

Modern Scots

Modern Scots describes the varieties of Scots traditionally spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster from 1700.Throughout its history, Modern Scots has been undergoing a process of language attrition, whereby successive generations of speakers have adopted more and more features from...

 as spoken by non-Travellers, such as mowdit "buried", mools "earth", both from muild(s), and gellie, from gailey (galley), "a bothy".

Gaelic influences

Loans from Gaelic include words like:

• cluishes "ears" (Gaelic cluasan or cluais, a dative
  Dative case
  The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
  
   form of cluas "ear")
• shain "bad" (Gaelic sean "old")

Romani influences

There are Romani loans such as and the percentage of Romani lexial borrowings is said to be up to 50% of the lexicon

Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

; some examples are:

• gadgie "man" (Romani gadžó "a non-Romani person")
• pannie "water" (Romani paní)