Every time a Scot calls a dinner plate an ashet, asks for a tassie of tea, or tells someone not to fash themselves, they are, without knowing it, speaking a little French. And they have been for seven hundred years.
How a 700-Year Alliance Changed the Way Scots Speak
The Auld Alliance — the treaty of mutual defence signed between Scotland and France in 1295 — is best remembered for politics and battles. But it did something far more intimate: it wove the French language into the everyday fabric of Scots speech.
For three centuries, French merchants, soldiers, and diplomats lived in Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen. Scots students studied at Paris and Orleans. Scottish soldiers guarded French kings. Words crossed the channel with every ship, carried by people who had no idea they were making linguistic history.
The Words Still Alive in Scotland Today
Ashet — that large oval serving plate found in Scottish kitchens — comes from the French assiette, meaning plate. The word has been in Scots for so long that most people assume it has always been there.
Tassie, a small cup or goblet, descends from the French tasse. It appears in Robert Burns’ poetry and still turns up in conversation across the Highlands today.
Douce — meaning gentle, quiet, and respectable — comes directly from the French doux/douce. “A douce wee woman” is a phrase any older Scot would recognise immediately. In English, there is no single word that carries quite the same weight.
The Words That Surprised Even Linguists
Gigot — a leg of lamb or mutton — comes straight from the French gigot. You will not hear it in London. You will hear it chalked up in butcher’s windows across Perthshire and Fife without a second thought.
Fash — as in “dinnae fash yerself” — comes from the French fâcher, to anger or irritate. It has softened over centuries into something gentler: a quiet Scottish instruction not to worry, not to get worked up over things that cannot be changed.
Gardyloo — the old Edinburgh warning cry shouted before emptying chamber pots from tenement windows into the street below — is perhaps the most dramatic borrowing of all. It comes from “Gare de l’eau” — watch out for the water. Edinburgh’s medieval Old Town rang with it nightly.
What Edinburgh Sounded Like Six Centuries Ago
Walk the Royal Mile today and you hear English, tourist accents, and the occasional Scots vowel stretching a syllable. Six hundred years ago, you would have heard something stranger and livelier.
French merchants clustered in the wynds off the High Street. The French Quarter of Edinburgh — long since vanished beneath later centuries — was a real neighbourhood, alive with trade and conversation and the sound of two languages colliding in the close quarters of the Old Town.
Scottish nobility sent their children to Paris. Mary Queen of Scots grew up speaking French as naturally as Scots. The royal court moved between Holyrood and the Loire Valley, and vocabulary moved with it, lodging itself in mouths that would carry it home across the water.
Why These Words Survived When Others Didn’t
Most borrowed words fade within a generation once the contact that produced them disappears. What kept these French words alive in Scots was the depth of the relationship — not merely diplomatic treaties but generations of genuine daily contact.
When the Auld Alliance finally collapsed in 1560, the words stayed. They survived because they filled gaps that nothing else could. Ashet described something that had no strong Scots equivalent. Douce carried a precision that the English “gentle” couldn’t quite match. Fash captured a particular shade of mild, simmering worry that no other word managed.
Language is stubbornly democratic. It keeps what it finds useful and discards the rest, regardless of politics or borders or the end of alliances.
Scotland’s Secret French Inheritance
There is something quietly marvellous about all of this. Scotland’s everyday speech — the speech of kitchens and butcher’s shops and old farmhouses — carries a French fingerprint that most Scots never notice.
The next time you hear a Scottish grandmother tell someone not to fash themselves, or watch a butcher chalk up a leg of gigot, or see an ashet passed across a table at Sunday lunch, you are hearing a seven-hundred-year-old echo. A whisper from the ships that once crossed between Leith and Calais, carrying soldiers and merchants and, along with them, a handful of words that refused to go home.
Scotland and France signed their alliance in 1295. In the kitchens and conversations of Scotland, that relationship never truly ended. It simply changed form — from treaties and battles into something no army could ever take away.
