Scots English has a vowel sound represented as /x/ in words such as loch; so does Welsh in such a word as bach (meaning little), and German in such a word as bach (meaning stream!). Standard English does not use this phoneme – I have started to wonder if this is a legacy of the impact of Norman and French having reduced the more guttural Germanic sounds of OE.

Can anyone enlighten me? Does modern French use the /x/ sound?