It was designed to promote the wonders of the Scots language but a new Scottish Government website has been attracting attention for the wrong reasons.

The site aims to encourage Scots to use the language of Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Irvine Welsh.

However, its message seems to have been lost in translation, with Scots language experts insisting words on the site including 'taeilka', 'feckfupairt' and 'wirhameowerdaeinsan' do not exist and claiming their inclusion makes the site largely incomprehensible.

Michael Hance, the director of the Scots Language Centre, told The Times: "It's clearly not been edited correctly as some words don't mean anything at all. Something has clearly got lost in translation somewhere along the line.

"It would appear that whoever was commissioned to write it didn't have the chance to check it before it went online.

"It's unfortunate because it's likely that people went on to the site and thought, because they couldn't make sense of some words, that they didn't have a proper grasp of Scots."

One sentence on the site read: "Scots is aaroon us in wirhameowerdaeinsan it is a furthie, feckfupairt o Scottish culture the day."

Pauline Cairns, the senior editor of Scottish Language Dictionaries, said it appeared 'quite a few' of the words on the site had been run together.

The Scottish Government said it was aware of errors on the site and vowed to correct them.

A spokesperson said: "We recognise the Scots language is an essential part of our distinctive culture and heritage and we take seriously its promotion and preservation. We thank The Times for drawing these minor formatting errors to our attention.

"We will correct these as part of a review of these pages at the earliest opportunity."

The 2011 census revealed that 1.5 million people regularly speak Scots, with 58,000 using Gaelic.