Why is Scots a Language?

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If you grew up in Scotland & reared speaking English, esp English with local dialect, you can understand it.

If you grew up elsewhere in the anglosphere, it depends how many Scots you knew & on your local dialect growing up.

But it's no different in that way to other strong local accents.

I do not mean Scottish Gaelic. I mean Robert Burns language.

It isn't mutually intelligible with most dialects of English, even if Scottish English exists in a continuum between Scots and English. As much as Scots is distinct from Scottish English it still slowly absorbs influence from SE, so it will always end up following English innovations and be unlikely to develop more of it's own that lead to it becoming less intelligible to English speakers.

There's a tendency for important tongues to steadily influence less important neighbours towards increasingly resembling them. Isolation will result in the opposite tendency.

This is a core issue in linguists; the boundaries between languages and the question of what's a dialect and what's a language aren't always clear.

Let's look up some references,

Starting with the Scottish government, https://www.gov.scot/policies/languages/scots/

I only realised how much of it's own language it was when I started watching Danish tv series. I could actually understand quite a few words like hus and hoose are the same words for house. Noo and noo are now. Are you really going to say these Danish words are just English words pronounced with an accent? I don't think so.

Maybe an actual Scottish person, rather than a phoney Scot born in England, could answer this question better than me, but I used to think that Scots words were just slang, not its own actual language.

Wait till you hear Doric, which is a Scots dialect.

You might also ask why Swiss German is a dialect but Lëtzebuergesch is a language.

This conversation brings to mind end of 1970s when we moved from Macon, Georgia, to Virginia Beach, Virginia, & the 11th grade English teacher had just moved there from New York City.

I spoke English.
She spoke English.
But English and English were two different languages.

It's not just a different accent, the syntax is different too. I find myself typing something out here and then rewriting it because I wonder if Americans will understand what I just wrote. Doesn't help that I'm from the North of England either, so that's a whole other kettle of fish.

Can people understand what I write ok? Or does it take some deciphering.

As has been said, a lot of it has to do with mutual intelligibility along a dialect continuum. Speakers of Scottish English are more likely to understand Scots speakers--if only by exposure--than more distant English speakers like me. Another example would be speakers of Austrian German being unable to understand speakers of Lower German (Plattdeutsch) in faraway northern Germany, while a speaker of 'standard' German living near Plattdeutsch speakers would be much more able to understand them.

Scots is a victim of the old adage: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy".
All too often we limit the label of language to those tongues which have clear national status (French, German, English), and label as mere dialects those tongues which do not--even if they clearly are their own languages (Occitan, Plattdeutsch, African American Vernacular English).
It doesn't help that this question is almost always muddled by nationalist politics. Russia has historically treated Ukrainian, for example, as a mere dialect of Russian to help justify Russian rule over Ukraine. Racism also goes hand in hand with these views. To many in England, Scots is just a broken English 'variety' spoken by uneducated, uncouth Celts.

I thought that Scots was only a nationality until now. I had no idea that Scots was a language. I guess you learn something everyday.