Scotland is one of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom, the others being England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Scotland comprises nearly a third of the territory of Great Britain and is home to over 5.4 million people. Part of Scotland’s territory comprises more than 790 islands.
It's an increasingly popular destination to live in. The National Records of Scotland reports that the Scottish population in the year up to mid-2023 rose to 5,490,100. This is 43,100 people more than in the middle of 2022.
The BBC reports that this 0.8% increase in population is the biggest single-year jump since 1946-1947. The biggest reason for this growth is more Brits and foreigners moving to Scotland.
“Almost two-thirds of people moving to Scotland came from outside the UK. We also saw a fall in the number of people leaving Scotland. Without migration into Scotland, the population would have fallen,” the National Records of Scotland head of demographic statistics, Esther Roughsedge, explained.
However, the population situation isn’t as rosy as some might think. “Deaths outnumbered births by the highest amount on record. There were 19,100 more deaths than births,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Scottish population is getting older, with over a fifth of residents aged 65 and over. Only 16% of Scots were aged 15 or under.
The ‘Scottish Patter’ project has been entertaining and amusing the internet for a long while now. Originally, its Facebook page was created in late November 2016, nearly 8 years ago.
As the idea behind the page started gaining traction, the humor-loving team behind it branched out to Instagram, too, in April 2017.
We've reached out to the team curating the project to learn more about its history, and we'll update the article as soon as we hear back from them.
At the time of writing, ‘Scottish Patter’ has an impressive 730k followers on Facebook. The page has also garnered an impressive 601k likes on the social network. Meanwhile, on Instagram, the project has seen an even greater deal of success. Currently, there are 1.1 million Scottish-humor-loving internet users who follow the account there.
The ‘patter’ in ‘Scottish Patter’ doesn’t just refer to rain (a common sight if you’ve ever visited the country). ‘Patter,’ according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is continuous and sometimes funny speech or talk.
Often, it’s related to entertainers speaking or someone trying to sell you something. Between the reference to rain and entertainment, it’s such a clever play on words. It’s fitting for a culture that values puns so much.
