The Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (1700-1945)

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The development of Modern Scottish EnglishThe development of English in Scotland has long been a controversial topic, to the extent that even the language labels are contested. The Modern Scots period is conventionally dated from 1700 to the present day. It therefore begins with the last stages of the standardisation of written English, as well as the onset of the 'Vernacular Revival' in literary Scots that produced writers like Robert Burns.Language use in Scotland in the modern period can be described as a continuum with Standard English at one end, and social and regional varieties of Broad Scots at the other. Writers vary their performance along that continuum, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their social background and the context of writing. It is generally thought that out of the interaction between Broad Scots and written Standard English, the hybrid prestige variety of today's Scottish English emerged. However, there is comparatively little study of how this happened, beyond some detailed analysis of the evidence of spelling reformers of the 18th century, mainly in relation to changes in pronunciation of the period. By creating a searchable digital archive of Scottish writing from this key period, we lay the foundations for a new account of language development in Scotland . Initial research using this resource will focus on the vexed issue of spelling variation. In comparison with the period post-1700, the Older Scots period (1375-1700) is well-served, with studies of Anglicization during this period supported by the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (HCOS), and the ongoing development of various sub-corpora of correspondence in Older Scots. Joan Beal observes in her survey of Modern Scots syntax and morphology in the 'Edinburgh History of Scots' that 'Nothing like the Helsinki Corpus exists for the modern period of Scots, so I have had to use a range of such materials as are available in compiling this chapter'. Since her survey, the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) has broken new ground by making available a searchable electronic resource of language in contemporary Scotland (1945-present day). The proposed MSW project will also break new ground by filling the chronological gap between the HCOS and the SCOTS resources, thus making available to scholars and others a complete historical record of a major language variety whose development parallels and interacts with Standard English. It will complement and enhance other AHRC funded research, such as Aberdeen University's work on representations of dialect in the novel in Ireland and Scotland in the nineteenth century.2. The Research ContextThe English Language Department at Glasgow University has an international reputation for the delivery of innovative electronic resources for research and teaching, including the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS, scheduled for completion in May 2007), the Thesaurus of Old English online, and the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE; part publication online, July 2006).3. Resource DevelopmentAs texts are added to the resource, available data about the birthplace, residence, gender, etc, of authors are also shown. Geographical information is integrated with Google Maps to give a user-friendly means of searching for regional variants. There will be a concordancing program and word-frequency information as part of a basic suite of analytical tools. Current electronic corpora of English varieties still face challenges caused by different spellings of the same word, and therefore ambiguities in the automatic analysis of many terms. The initial linguistic research on the MSW resource will focus mainly on the structure of Modern Scots orthography in order to give insights into the automatic identification of spelling variants. The resource will then become a powerful tool for the analysis of language variation generally and a key point of reference for generations to come.