Matthew Fitt is a poet and novelist. He was born in Dundee in 1968 and having lived in Prague, New York and Sydney, he is currently resident in Lanarkshire. A former writer-in-residence at Brownsbank and Pollok, he is a co-founder of the successful children's imprint, Itchy Coo.

His first novel, But 'n' Ben A-Go-Go, was published in 2000, followed by a collection of poetry, Kate O'Shanter's Tale, in 2003. He visits schools and colleges speaking to students about his writing and his work in Scots.

Scottish National Diction is a poem written in Scots with a hope that it will challenge, entertain and introduce British Council visitors to the language of Robert Burns, the mother tongue of Sir Sean Connery and Sir Alex Ferguson and of an estimated 1.6 million other Scotsmen and women.

The poem is first and foremost a celebration of the origins of the Scots Language. Not all but a number of the poem’s stanzas are shot through with words whose journey began elsewhere, namely Scandinavia and France, in the dialects of ancient Rome and that of Celtic Ireland.

Perhaps they will be readily spotted but it won’t be giving too much away to confirm that dreich is Anglian for miserable, nieve is Norse for fist, dominie Latinate Scots for teacher, glen the Scots word for valley borrowed from Scottish Gaelic ‘gleann’, and ‘aguillanneuf’ meaning New Year’s gift in Old French giving Scots one of its linguistic celebrities, Hogmanay.

The layout of the poem is also a bit of a teaser. That each stanza presents itself in the style of an entry in a dictionary is a nod to those who say all Scots poets have their heads too much stuck in dictionaries and a wave to those who call Scots merely slang English.

Scots is a living force, one which after many years of neglect the people of Scotland are returning to through poetry and prose, in education and national debate. It is exciting that the British Council Scotland website has captured this spirit with three new poems in English, Scottish Gaelic and Scots.