Scottish surnames are held by people hailing from Scotland in the north of Britain or by people and families of Scottish ancestry who live abroad, often in Ulster or some of the southern states in America such as the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama where Scottish people settled in great numbers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scottish surnames are the product of two major influences. Many Scottish surnames are effectively Irish surnames owing to the influence of Irish culture in Scotland in ancient and medieval times. Others are reflective of the encroachment of English culture and naming practices into Lowland Scotland from the High Middle Ages (c. 1000 – 1300) onwards.
Scottish history
Scottish surnames are derived from two different sources external to Scotland itself, one coming from Ireland and the other from England. In Roman times the region was controlled by the Caledonians a Brittonic-Celtic people who were one of the few peoples who managed to militarily resist Roman incursion into their territory.[1] However, in the fifth and sixth centuries Scotland did experience colonization, particularly in the Outer Hebrides and west and north of the country, by newcomers from Ireland. Western and northern Scotland consequently became part of the wider Gaeltacht, the Irish speaking parts of Britain and Ireland. Here Gaelic surnames or Scottish Gaelic surnames emerged in the course of the High Middle Ages and late medieval period. A great proportion of these are patronymic surnames which indicate a line of descent from a significant ancestor. Examples include MacGregor, meaning ‘son of Gregor’, MacLeod, meaning ‘son of Leod’, and so on and so forth.[2]
A very different surname tradition obtains in the south and much of the east of Scotland. This region, often termed Lowland Scotland, was much more closely aligned with northern England politically and socially. As early the eighth century Northumbrian Old English was being used in Lowland Scotland. However, it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the reigns of rulers like King James I of Scotland that English became the dominant language of government and culture in Lowland Scotland. As it did, English surnames like Smith, Brown, Bruce, Wilson and Anderson became increasingly common here. They remain the most common surnames in Scotland down to the present day. Hence Scotland has two different surname traditions which were imported into the country by outsiders at various times during the Middle Ages.[3]
Most popular Scottish surnames
The most popular Scottish surnames tend to be as follows:
Smith – This is the most common surname in Scotland. It is a surname derived from England and originated as a surname used to describe a person who worked as a blacksmith.[4]
Brown – The second most common surname in Scotland. It is also a surname of English origin, one which developed as a descriptor for people with brown hair.
Stewart – This is a Scottish surname of Scots Gaelic origin. It is derived from the word stiùbhart which means a ‘steward’, the term for someone who presides over a household or court. Ultimately one branch of Stewarts (often spelled Stuarts by early modern historians) rose to become the kings of Scotland and then England and Ireland from 1603 onwards. They had first risen as a noble family to power as the High Stewards to the Scottish royal court and government in the late medieval period.[5]
Campbell – This is one of the most common surnames of Scots Gaelic origin in Scotland. It is derived from the Irish words cam and beál, Cam means ‘crooked’ and beál means ‘mouth’, so Campbell transliterates as ‘crooked mouth’, indicating that the surname was first applied to people believed to be deceitful or manipulative.[6]
MacDonald / McDonald– The tenth most common surname in Scotland, but it merits mention here as a classic example of a Gaelic-style Scottish surname, in this instance a patronymic meaning ‘son of Donald’.[7]
Geographical spread of Scottish surnames
A map of Gaelic speakers in Scotland today
As we have seen, there is a clear geographical spread to the distribution of Scottish surnames. Surnames of Irish origin are typically found in the west and north of the country, while surnames of English origin are most commonly found in the south and east or the Scottish Lowlands. Yet, while this was the historical pattern, the situation has evolved in the modern era as people have moved around and migrated towards the larger cities. This has resulted in many MacDonalds, Campbells, MacLeods, MacGregors and other families with Scottish Gaelic surnames migrating eastwards and southwards to cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, particularly so in the nineteenth century during Scotland’s period of industrialization and urbanization. Accordingly, while there is still a geographical pattern to Scottish surnames which mirrors the medieval heritage, this has been diluted by modern societal developments.[8]
The Scottish diaspora has also led to the spread of Scottish surnames abroad. Beginning in the early seventeenth century large numbers of Scottish people left their homeland and moved abroad. The first destination in the seventeenth century was Ulster, the northern province of Ireland which the British government initiated an enormous plantation of in the 1600s. This, combined with regular famines at home in Scotland, drove tens of thousands of people to travel across the Irish Sea from Scotland to Ulster. Many of these were Lowland Scots with surnames of English origin and so in Ulster today we find hundreds of thousands of Scots Irish bearing surnames like Foster and Hunter, but many others had Scottish Gaelic surnames like Cunningham and MacDonald.[9]
In the eighteenth century the Scottish diaspora spread to North America where Scottish people from Scotland and second or third-generation Scottish settlers in Ulster moved across the Atlantic Ocean to the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee in particular. These became known as the Scots-Irish or Scotch-Irish in America. Later Scottish immigration focused on other regions in the nineteenth century such as Australia and New Zealand, though migration to North America also continued. Andrew Carnegie, the nineteenth-century steel magnate and philanthropist who founded Carnegie Hall in New York City amongst other deeds, was, for example, born in Dunfermline in Scotland in 1835 before his family immigrated to Pennsylvania when he was just entering his teenage years.[10]
Famous people with Scottish surnames
An engraving of William Wallace produced in 1757William Wallace – The romanticized Scottish liberation fighter who resisted the efforts of King Edward I of England to conquer Scotland in the late thirteenth century famously depicted by Mel Gibson in Braveheart. His surname is ultimately derived from an Anglo-Norman word Waleis meaning ‘Welshman’, a surname which indicates a perception that the Wallaces came from Wales originally.[11]
Robert Burns – An eighteenth-century poet and lyricist deemed to be the unofficial national poet of Scotland. His surname is unusual in so far as Burns could either be derived from the English surname Burns or from the Irish O’Burn.[12]
Kelly Macdonald – An acclaimed Scottish actress who had a break-out role in Trainspotting before starring in films like the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men. Her surname is a patronymic surname of Scottish Gaelic origin meaning ‘son (i.e. Mac) of Donald’, though obviously over time this was applied to both sons and daughters.
Andy Murray – Britain’s greatest ever tennis player, winner of three Grand Slams (including two Wimbledon Championships) and a former world No. 1. His surname is of Scottish Gaelic origin and is a provenance surname, Murray being derived from the family’s original roots in ‘Moray’ or the Moray Firth in northern Scotland.
