In one of those about-turns best described as ‘better late than never’, the US Library of Congress has just reversed a rather unfortunate (not to say culturally ignorant) decision to reclassify all Scottish authors as “English”. The controversial proposal to extinguish the highly regarded contribution of Scottish literature as a distinctive entity from the official record met with a storm of protest from academics, politicians, and authors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Overnight, authors like John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson, poets such as Robert Burns and the great McGonagall, and modern day bestsellers from JK Rowling to Iain (M) Banks would all have been recategorised as belonging to the English canon. Playwright and Poet Laureate Liz Lochhead, in typically restrained language, had accused the American authorities of ‘cultural imperialism’. And even the British Library went way out on a limb to ‘welcome the decision’ when news of the reversed decision came through.

It seems that the original misguided intention stemmed partly from a widespread and basic misunderstanding of the nature of language and languages, which for example calls English a ‘language’ but Scots a ‘dialect’, when any specialist academic will confirm that both have equal claim to authority. Which gets called which is a political statement, and nothing to do with linguistics. But few in the world of literature would challenge the fact that Scottish literature has always, rightly, been regarded as its own tradition. And for now, fortunately, it can remain so in the US too.