>And what about Scottish, Irish, and Welsh -> are they considered forms of English too?
Mmmm - very brave.
Having lived in Wales and Scotland I would hesitate to answer this question. In general, people in Scotland don't seem to talk about "English". Even in school the lesson that I called "English" is called "language" to recognise the contribution made to our language by the rest of Britain (but maybe not the rest of the world?!).
In Welsh schools the Welsh language is taught. In some schools for five hours each week, in others as the main method of communication. Welsh is a Celtic language, its nearest cousins being Cornish and Breton. The language as spoken today is descended directly from Early Welsh, which emerged as a distinct tongue as early as the sixth century AD. It is thus the oldest living language of Great Britain and among the oldest in Europe. The Welsh Language Board
http://www.bwrdd-yr-iaith.org.uk gives an overview of the issues. All official communication in Wales is now required to be bilingual.
http://www.budgetbritain.com/roughguide/wales_language.asp is also interesting.
Examples of the way English is/was spoken in Wales can be found in the poems of Dylan Thomas (who died in 1953), he can be heard at
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=151. I'm sure that there are plenty of modern examples of Welsh speech around too.
In Scotland, only a few schools have Gaelic units. I know one in Edinburgh where the only teaching medium is Gaelic for the first two years. The local newspaper prints some articles in both English and Gaelic (pronounced Gallic in Scotland). There is a reasonable discussion of the language in
http://www.budgetbritain.com/roughguide/scotland_language.aspThe other important language is "Scots", to quote the site mentioned above, "While Gaelic has undergone something of a renaissance, Scots, or "Lallans", as spoken by the "English-speaking" majority of Scottish people, is still struggling for recognition. In form, at least, it is closely related to the English spoken south of the border, since it began life as a northern branch of Anglo-Saxon. In the early fifteenth century, it replaced Latin as the country's main literary and documentary language, but has since been drawn closer to southern varieties of English. Some people claim it to be a separate language, which has suffered the same systematic repression as Gaelic, while others reject this view, considering it to be, at best, an artificial amalgamation of local dialects. Robbie Burns is the most obvious literary exponent of the Scots language, but there has been a revival this century led by poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid." You can find examples of the writing of Robbie Burns
http://home.t-online.de/home/hoffmann.t/bobburns.htm and Hugh MacDiarmid
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~lanes/english/flood.htm.
If you want to hear examples of recent speech in Scotland then look out for the film of "Trainspotting" or look out for Billy Connoly.
I have noticed, since I moved to Scotland that much of modern American derives from Scottish, rather than English usage. Exapmles include "pinkie" for little finger and "Main Street" rather than "High Street". I'd be interested to know the number of Scottish immigrants compared to English in the early days of America.
I'm sure that there some Scottish and Welsh people out there who have views on current language.
