Conference 2015, 12-14 August 2015, UWS, Ayr Campus

Conference Abstracts

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Introducing FITSRhona Alcorn (with Vasilis Karaiskos, Joanna Kopaczyk, Bettelou Los, Warren

Maguire, Benjamin Molineaux)

One of the most striking aspects of early Scots materials is the sheer number of

spelling variants for what are single words with fixed spellings in Present Day

Standard Written English. Only when a national written standard began to emerge in

the 16th century did spellings become fixed; thus it is no surprise that in pre-1500

Scots, a word like ‘law’ can be spelled in multiple ways, including: lach, lacht, lath,

lau, lauch, laucht, lauth, lav, law, lawe, lawch. Linguists generally assume that

differences such as these at least partly reflect differences in pronunciation

associated with different times and different places. The actual phonic detail of

assumed pronunciations, however, remains largely unexplored.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce FITS (From Inglis to Scots: Mapping

Sounds to Spellings), a new research project at the University of Edinburgh which

aims to reconstruct the phonic substance of variant spellings attested in a large

collection of documents written in Scots between 1380 (the date of the earliest

materials) and 1500. The paper will summarise the project’s goals and methods, and

will explain how FITS will bring about a deeper understanding of the linguistic history

of Inglis (the lingua franca of the multilingual early Scottish burghs), Scots and

English, and of the relationships between them.

Preaspiration and Preglottalization in Hebrides EnglishIan Clayton

Preaspirated voiceless stops, well documented in Scottish Gaelic (e.g., Nance &

Stuart-Smith 2013, Clayton 2010), have also been reported in the varieties of English

spoken in the Hebrides Island chain (Shuken 1984, Wells 1982, Borgstrøm 1940).

However, no detailed examination of the phonetics or demographic distribution of

preaspiration in these varieties has previously been conducted.

This paper presents the results of a sociophonetic study of preaspiration in

Hebrides English, based on the English spoken by 24 male and female Gaelic-

English bilinguals, aged 19 to 75, representing nine distinct regions within the

Hebrides. The study found that while most participants produced at least a few

preaspirated tokens, the feature was more abundant in women than men, and more

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common in older women (> 50 years) than younger. In particular, older women from

Lewis preaspirated significantly more often than the remaining participants. The

study also found that a number of speakers articulated voiceless stops with

noticeable preglottalization (i.e. creaky voice). Preglottalization was most abundant

in the speech of younger women (< 50 years).

These findings suggest two sound changes in progress. First, preaspiration

appears to be an obsolescent dialectal feature of Hebrides English (especially Lewis

English), rather than a synchronic Gaelic → English interference feature, as some

scholars have proposed (Wells 1982, Borgstrøm 1940). Second, preglottalization

may be an incoming feature adopted by local speakers on the model of high-prestige

varieties like Edinburgh English (Gordeeva & Scobbie 2011).

ReferencesBorgstrøm, Carl HJ. 1940. The dialects of the Outer Hebrides: A linguistic survey of

the Gaelic dialects of Scotland, vol. I. Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap

suppl. vol. I. Oslo: H. Aschehoug & Co.

Clayton, Ian. 2010. On the natural history of preaspirated stops. Ph.D. dissertation.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Gordeeva, Olga & James M. Scobbie. 2011. Laryngeal variation in the Scottish

English voice contrast: Glottalisation, ejectivisation and aspiration. Queen

Margaret University Working Papers. Accessed April 13, 2015:

http://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/2793/

Nance, Claire & Jane Stuart-Smith. 2013. Pre-aspiration and post-aspiration in

Scottish Gaelic stop consonants. Journal of the International Phonetic

Association 43(2), 129-152.

Shuken, Cynthia. 1984. Highland and island English. In Peter Trudgill (ed.),

Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 152-

166.

Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

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The Language of Lord Fife’s Letters to George Grenville 1763 – 1769Janet Cruickshank

Lord Fife (1729 – 1809) was a native Scots speaker who lived through the final

stages of anglicisation of the standard language of Scotland. The language of his

correspondence with another Scots speaker in the latter half of the eighteenth

century could be described as an early variety of Scottish Standard English but his

linguistic repertoire stretched from Scots to almost Standard English. Further

analysis of Fife’s language, this time in correspondence with George Grenville (1712

– 1770), the British prime minister and statesman, has been undertaken to assess

how Fife adapted to communicating with a highly placed Standard English speaker

during the normative and prescriptive era of the second half of the eighteenth

century. This assessment has revealed some use of Scots and non-standard

grammar forms by Fife, but by avoiding most of the Scots lexemes and idioms he

used frequently with his Scottish correspondent, Fife’s language with Grenville was

generally closer to Standard English than that used with his fellow Scot. A pragmatic

approach has been taken in the examination of Fife’s correspondence with Grenville

to determine the motivation for his language choice. There is evidence that Fife

made an effort to conform to the requirements of the age with the use of ‘polite’

English in formal considered communications, however his unmarked language in

more informal letters could still be classified as early Scottish Standard English,

although some allowance was made for Grenville’s presumed lack of knowledge of

Scots.

Scots language in Scotland’s schools todayBruce Eunson

For over a year now four Scots Language Coordinators have been working for

Education Scotland. In this time they have been developing the place of, and use of,

Scots language in education. This has involved engaging with teachers to build their

confidence and to provide training, improve the status of Scots – both within and

outside of education – and promote an ongoing relationship with features of the

language itself.

The SLC team members will discuss the work they have conducted so far;

work they plan to pursue in the future; and links they have identified between Scots

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at school level and academic level. This will involve a summary of their key

workstreams; such as, the Scots Language Ambassadors initiative, where prominent

Scots speakers link with schools across the country; and ‘Keen tae Ken yir Kin’

which is a project looking at the regional variations of Scots, pairing schools from

across the country in order to exchange writing in dialect and develop an

understanding of the similarities and differences which appear between the various

varieties of Scots. Other workstreams include projects with Historic Scotland and

Junior Tour Guides, the Scottish Government’s 1+2 initiative relating to the learning

of languages other than English, the new SQA Scots Language Award, Scottish

Studies, translations and readings of The Gruffalo as well as many more.

Projects and experiences such as these have resulted in the Coordinators

meeting a variety of language issues that may be of interest to the FRLSU audience,

such as; what is it like involving a language in the classroom when there is no

standard or accepted definition?; what are teacher and pupil responses to this?; the

need for further academic research – particularly to explore the anecdotal evidence

around boys performing better in literacy, attainment and engagement when lessons

feature in Scots – the need for more Scots language texts – particularly non-fiction…

Lastly, we would be interested to hear what questions and messages there

are, which we can consider and possibly take back to Education Scotland and the

Scottish Government.

’Tis (almost) three centuries since: linguistic explorations in The Lyon in MourningMarina Dossena

Three centuries after the 1715 Jacobite rising, and 270 years since “the Forty-five”,

the year that would leave such an indelible mark on Scottish history, literature, and

possibly language, it may be of interest to look at the documents collected in The

Lyon in Mourning (Forbes 1746-75 [Paton 1895-96]), a contemporary “account of

events”. In particular, this contribution aims to discuss how argument and fact coexist

in a collection of texts which are presented in what might be taken to be a fairly

neutral textual organization, though the compiler was a Jacobite, and despite a

subtitle in which it is clearly stated that the collection was “as exactly made as the

iniquity of the times would permit” (Forbes 1747: Titlepage).

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The collection comprises letters (both familiar and official), dying speeches,

journals and accounts: i.e., text types in which subjectivity inevitably occurs

alongside strategies meant to stress reliability. The diversity of such text types and

the impossibility of ascertaining editorial interventions make quantitative analyses

hardly viable within the scope of this contribution; instead, the paper will present an

overview of the main pragmatic strategies that seem to be at work when the aim is to

elicit the readers’ sympathy and solidarity, while maintaining an overall chronicling

style.

Though it could be assumed that contemporary readers were indeed on the

same side as the compiler, the attempt to collect and preserve documents for

posterity suggests that the compiler was in fact envisaging a larger audience: people

who had not experienced the events, nor met witnesses, and who therefore had to

be persuaded of the validity of the arguments at hand simply by relying on linguistic

and textual strategies.

ReferenceForbes, Robert (compiler) 1746-75. The Lyon in Mourning, ed. by Henry Paton for

the Scottish History Society (1895-96), 3 vols., at

http://digital.nls.uk/print/transcriptions/index.html (accessed March 2015).

Hold the front page! Scotland’s newspaper language 1995-2015 Fiona Douglas

On the 18th of September 2014, Scotland stood at a political crossroads. At 85 per

cent, the turnout rate for the historic independence referendum was the highest

recorded for any election in the UK since the introduction of universal suffrage in

1918, and for the first time 16 and 17 year olds were allowed to vote. Although a 55

per cent majority voted to remain part of the United Kingdom, the strength of the

“yes” campaign sent shockwaves through the UK political establishment. 7 th May

2015 sees the UK’s first General Election since the referendum, and early indications

suggest that the independence debate has not gone away, with the SNP predicted to

massively influence the outcome both within and furth of Scotland. Much has been

written on the link between language and nationhood, but what effect, if any, has

Scotland’s changing political landscape in the last two decades had on the language

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of its newspapers? Has new-found national political confidence and clout stimulated

or stifled the use of a distinctively Scottish voice by its press - a press that prides

itself on speaking for the people of Scotland. What of the other, newer voices? The

ascendance of social media and online newspaper comment forums has given both

pundits and punters an unprecedented ‘right to reply’; to what extent are they now

part of ‘the voice of Scotland’? Based on analysis of a sizeable diachronic corpus,

this paper gives the headline developments in Scotland’s national newspapers over

the last 20 years.

Gif youre grace will command me with ony service ye sall fynd me obedient: on the use of will and shall in Older Scots if-clausesChristine Elsweiler

The Scots modal auxiliaries will and shall are used to express a range of modal

meanings, such as obligation, the volitional meanings intention, willingness and

refusal, as well as prediction, which overlap in some uses, e.g. intention, but are

clearly distinguished in others, e.g. obligation denoted by shall. This paper explores

the use of will and shall in Older Scots conditional clauses as represented in the

Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, which covers the majority of the Older Scots period

with a wide range of texts composed between 1450 and 1700. The investigation is

based on a stratified sample of 1000 instances of will and shall respectively, which

were analysed according to specific parameters such as modal meaning and

syntactic context.

In this talk, I will, in a first step, highlight characteristic contexts and

conditioning factors, both language external, i.e. genre, and internal, e.g. politeness

strategies, which favour the use of either will or shall. In a second step, I intend to

describe the contexts in if-conditionals in which either modal is possible.

Areal and typological features of the Scottish varieties of EnglishMarkku Filppula

Linguistic research on Scottish English(es) has revealed a number of syntactic

features that are shared by Scots, Scottish English and types of ‘contact-English’

spoken in the Western Isles of Scotland. In this paper, these will be examined in light

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of the evidence available from some previous studies of Scottish varieties (e.g.

Sabban 1982; Shuken 1984; Miller 1993; Macafee and Ó Baoill 1997) and from

transcribed recordings with dialect speakers from the Hebridean Islands in the late

1970s and early 1980s. This material is stored in the sound archives of the School of

Scottish Studies in Edinburgh.

The syntactic features examined include some nonstandard uses of the

definite article, reflexive pronouns and the progressive form of verbs. Most of these

uses have been documented in previous studies of Scottish varieties (e.g. Sabban

1982; Shuken 1984; Miller 1993), but it is interesting to note that, apart from some

other dialects spoken in the British Isles and Ireland (see, e.g. Filppula 1999 and

2006), they are also found to occur in varieties of English spoken in other parts of the

world. This raises the question of the nature and origins of the Scottish features: to

what extent can they be considered to be ‘universal’ in some sense or another, or

are they the result of language or dialect contacts within the areal context of the

British Isles and Ireland?

The findings of this study will be compared to the morphosyntactic

classifications of varieties of English presented in several recent works, some of

which are based on eWAVE (e.g. Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi. 2004), while others

have drawn on other databases (e.g. Davydova et al. 2011; Trudgill 2011; Siemund

2013). A central factor emerging from all of these studies is the nature (and degree)

of contacts with other languages or dialects, which then determines the type of

variety and the linguistic outcomes characteristic of each type. The Scottish varieties

turn out to display features that are typical of both ‘high-contact L1’ and ‘traditional

L1’ varieties. In this respect, they behave much in the same way as the Irish dialects

of English.

References:Davydova, J. Hilbert, M., Pietsch, L. and P. Siemund (2011). “Comparing varieties of

English:problems and perspectives”. In: Siemund, P. (ed.), Linguistic Universals

and Language Variation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Filppula, M. (1999). The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style.

(Routledge Studies in Germanic Linguistics 5). London and New York, 1999:

Routledge.

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Filppula, M. (2006). “The making of Hiberno-English and the other ‘Celtic Englishes’”.

In van Kemenade, A. and B. Los (eds) (2006), The Handbook of the History of

English. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kortmann, B. and B. Szmrecsanyi. 2004. "Global Synopsis: Morphological and

Syntactic Variation in English". In: B. Kortmann/E. Schneider with K.

Burridge/R. Mesthrie/C. Upton, eds. A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 2:

Morphology, Syntax. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1142-1202.

Kortmann, Bernd & Lunkenheimer, Kerstin (eds.) 2013. The Electronic World Atlas of

Varieties of English. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary

Anthropology. (Available online at http://ewave-atlas.org).

Macafee, C.I. & C. Ó Baoill (1997). “Why Scots is not a Celtic English”. In Tristram,

H.L.C. (ed.), 245–86.

Miller, J. (1993). “The grammar of Scottish English”. In Milroy, J. and L. Milroy (eds.),

Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles. London:

Longman, 99–138.

Sabban, A. (1982). Gälisch-Englischer Sprachkontakt. Heidelberg: Julius Groos.

Shuken, C. R. (1984) “Highland and Island English”. In P. Trudgill (ed.), Language in

the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Siemund, P. (2013). Varieties of English: A Typological Approach. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Complement shift in Ulster English and Ulster ScotsAlison Henry

This paper discusses a structure present in a number of Ulster English varieties and

in Ulster Scots, where a complement of an inchoative verb appears before the verb,

which has not previously been discussed in the generative syntactic literature

1It’s very blustery got

2He’s wile tall got

The structure has the following characteristics:

(a) For most speakers it is restricted to the verb get, and cannot occur with

become although the latter has a similar meaning

3*It’s very blustery become

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Robinson (2005) claims that it can occur with other verbs such as turn in Ulster

Scots.

(b) It can only occur when the auxiliary be is present; complement shift alternates

with unshifted structures where the auxiliary must be have, and it cannot

occur if there is no auxiliary.

4The twins are wile tall got

5*The twins have wile tall got

6*The twins are got wile tall

7 The twins have got wile tall

8*The twins wile tall got

9The twins are wile tall getting

(c) For most speakers the structure is better where there is an intensifier present

10? The twins are tall got

This paper will consider the analysis of the structure, suggesting that there are at

least two possible grammars. For some speakers, the shifted complement appears

to be in a low topic position within TP; for others, be in fact appears to be a copula

rather than an auxiliary with the form of get being not a participle but a change of

state marker.

Syntax of Scottish Standard English – influence from Scots? Sanna Hillberg

In the proposed paper, I will talk about Scottish Standard English (SSE), an under-

researched variety of BrE, and the possible infiltration of Scots usages in its

application of relative clauses and selected modal verbs. Thus far, there has been

very little scholarly interest in the morphosyntactic features of SSE and about Scots’

influence in it.

As my databases I use the Corpus of Scottish English Online Press News and

spoken parts of the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) and ICE-

Scotland (under construction). The use of these syntactic features have been

reported to be “massively different” in Scots in comparison to StE (Miller 2008: 304).

With respect to news language, the broadest dialectal features are absent in

the use of both investigated features. Findings of my PhD thesis indicate that some

Scots features of relativizer use are attested firmly in the SSE news writing, for

example, the uses of that and the zero relativizer. However, the wh-relativizers

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predominate in news, which is expected because they are considered “formal”

relativizers and their use is characteristic of written genres. Of the modal verbs, will,

can and should are frequent in news. By contrast to the description given in Miller

(2008), shall is a feature of spoken Scots in the SCOTS corpus, and it occurs in

news, but is rare in both. In like manner, ought is exceedingly rare in both news and

speech.

This study argues that some Scots usages are carried over to SSE and therefore

SSE should not be considered merely as a phonetic deviation from standard BrE, but

as having regional features of its own.

References:

Hillberg, S. Forthcoming. Relativization in Scottish Standard English: a Corpus-

based Study.

Miller, J. 2008. ‘Scottish English: morphology and syntax’. In Kortmann, B. and C.

Upton (eds.), Varieties of English. 1, The British Isles. Berlin: Mouton de

Gruyter, pp. 299–327.

Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech, http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk

Preaspiration in North Argyll Gaelic and its contribution to prosodic structurePavel Iosad, Michael Ramsammy and Patrick Honeybone

This paper reports the preliminary results of an acoustic study of preaspiration in the

Gaelic of North Argyll. Existing descriptions identify this area as reflecting Old Irish

and Old Norse ‘voiceless’ geminates as [xp xt xk] clusters (‘pre-affricates’), but, to

our knowledge, no targeted acoustic study of these varieties had been performed to

date. Our results confirm that the preaspiration found in other varieties corresponds

to dorsal (velar or uvular) frication in North Argyll, rather than other conceivable

interpretations of the impressionistic descriptions.

We discuss the broader repercussions of these findings regarding the nature

of preaspiration in these varieties. In particular, we find only very scant evidence of

pre-frication after long vowels (in words like *pàpa* ‘Pope’, *bàta* ‘boat’), which

contrasts with regular pre-frication after short vowels. This apparent neutralization of

laryngeal contrast outside the initial foot suggests that (at least Argyll) Gaelic shows

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a weakly unconditioned reduction process (lenition; Honeybone 2012) similar to

languages such as English or Icelandic. Further, if this analysis is correct, it suggests

that preaspiration in North Argyll Gaelic contributes a mora to the stressed syllable

(in parallel to South Argyll Gaelic, and in an echo of Ó Baoill 1980). We argue that

the development from preaspiration to a moraic segment is parallel to that

hypothesized by Pétur Helgason (2002) for Icelandic, and discuss the consequences

of this analysis for the question of internal vs external origin of preaspiration.

Knappin: Standard versus dialect speech modification in ShetlandKerry Karam

Dialect speakers from the Shetland Islands have, for generations, considered

themselves to be bidialectal and part of a rural community that has access to both a

local and a supra-local variety in their linguistic repertoire. Speakers use both the

local dialect and a more standardised English in their everyday speech; but how

much control do they really have over these two dialects? Are they consciously

aware of which dialect they are using during conversations and are they using the

local variety as much as they think? A switch from the local dialect to a standard

form is, in Shetland, known as Knappin and in the past this was certainly a very clear

and distinct shift between Shetland dialect and an affected Standard English; mostly

used when taking to outsiders. Over time, however, the how, when and why

regarding the use of the two varieties has become somewhat blurred and there is

evidence to suggest that something more complicated is occurring.

I will present research on this insular variety of Scottish Standard English that

aims to go some way towards establishing whether Knappin occurs to such an

extent that the traditional dialect is no longer in common use or as recognisable as it

once was and, as a result, may be showing signs of moving permanently towards a

standard variety. I will also use quantitative and qualitative linguistic data to present

an overview of language perceptions in Shetland: something that is often discussed,

rarely agreed and even less so documented.

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Debating the power of witches’ words in 17th-century Scottish courtroomsMagdalena Leitner

Witchcraft cases are important sources for the reconstruction of spoken language of

the past because words uttered in everyday conflicts were recorded as crucial

circumstantial evidence (Culpeper and Kytö, 2010: 80). Historical Scottish court

records in particular provide untapped linguistic evidence for examining the power

associated with witches’ words from a new perspective that is unavailable in Early

Modern English (EModE) trials, namely that of defence lawyers (see Walker, 1995:

431). This paper investigates which speech-act functions were attributed to alleged

witches’ utterances by different trial parties in three 17 th-century Scottish witchcraft

cases.

While pragmatic aspects of courtroom interaction in EModE witchcraft trials

have been examined by a number of scholars (e.g. Hiltunen, 2010, Kahlas-Tarkka,

2012), comparatively little has been written on witches’ everyday quarrels with

neighbours. The present paper expands Culpeper and Semino’s (2000) definitions of

curses by integrating them in Jucker and Taavitsainen’s (2000: 74) ‘pragmatic

space’, a concept derived from semantic field theory that helps to describe shared

and distinctive features of speech acts with related functions. Qualitative analyses of

Scottish trial parties’ judgements of alleged witches’ speech are contextualised by

consulting historical research (e.g. Goodare, 2013). Witchcraft speech acts in the

investigated cases were evaluated mainly as threats with different, overlapping,

degrees of performativity, ranging from venting anger to effective harm-causing

curses. The supernatural dimension of witches’ threats is absent in present-day

threats (see e.g. Castelfranchi and Guerini, 2007).

Manuscript sourcesNational Records of Scotland, Edinburgh. High Court Book of Adjournal – Old

Series, 1619-1631, MS JC2/6 (ff. 59v-78v (Margaret Wallace), ff. 264r-277v

(Isobel Young)), MS JC2/8 (pp. 397-425, 429 (Agnes Finnie)).

Print/electronic sourcesGillon, S. A. and J. I. Smith (eds.). 1953/1972-74. Selected Justiciary Cases 1624-

1650. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Stair Society.

Mackenzie, G. 1678. The Laws and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal.

Edinburgh: Thomas Brown.

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Pitcairn, R. (ed.). 2005 [1833]. Criminal Trials in Scotland from 1488 to 1624. 3 vols.

CD-ROM. Burlington, Canada: TannerRitchie Publishing.

ReferencesCastelfranchi, C. and M. Guerini. 2007. Is it a promise or a threat? Pragmatics &

Cognition 15:2, 277-311.

Culpeper, J. and M. Kytö. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues. Spoken Interaction

as Writing. Cambridge: CUP.

Culpeper, J. and E. Semino. 2000. Constructing witches and spells: Speech acts and

activity types in Early Modern England. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1:1,

97-116.

Goodare, J. (ed.). 2013. Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters. Houndmills,

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hiltunen, R. 2010. Discourse and context in a historical perspective: On courtroom

interaction in Salem, 1692. In: S.-K. Tanskanen, M.-L. Helasvuo, M.

Johansson and M. Raitaniemi (eds.). Discourses in Interaction.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 61-77.

Jucker, A. H. and I. Taavitsainen. 2000. Diachronic speech act analysis. Insults from

flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1:1, 67-95.

Kahlas-Tarkka, L. 2012. “I am a Gosple woman”: On language in the courtroom

discourse during the Salem witch trials, with special reference to female

examinees. Studia Neophilologica 84:sup1, 55-69.

Walker, D. 1995. A Legal History of Scotland: The Sixteenth Century. Edinburgh: T.

& T. Clark Ltd.

The be-perfect in transitive structures in Orkney and Shetland Scots: Influenced by Norn or not?Ragnhild Ljosland

Whereas Standard English allows I’m done, or I’m changed since I converted to

Buddhism, or I’m not seen behind this curtain, but not for example *I’m done the

dishes, or *I’m changed the tyres, or *I’m not seen Jenny for a long time, these

structures are all considered to be grammatical in the Orkney and Shetland varieties

of Scots. As observed by Melchers, it is not clear whether the use of to be as an

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auxiliary in transitive constructions in Orkney and Shetland is a relic or an innovation.

Attempting to explain it as influenced by late Norn, Alexander Pavlenko (in Scottish

Language 16, 1997) examines late Norn fragments collected by Jakob Jakobsen in

1893-95, and observes along with Jakobsen that a range of Old Norse grammatical

endings have been conflated as “-a”, for example in the fragment “Jarta, bodena

komena rontena Komba” glossed as ‘My heart (my dear), the boat has come round

de Kaim [a hill in Foula near the coast]’. He further demonstrates such a-levelling by

analysing a Norn fragment known as The Troll’s Message, and suggests that the

Norn words for ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ were homophonous as a result of the a-levelling .

In this paper, I will show that an alternative translation of The Troll’s Message

weakens Pavlenko’s case. I will further discuss the idea of a-levelling in Norn,

consider alternative explanations for the be-perfect in transitive constructions, and

offer a tentative alternative explanation based on the grammar of Orkney and

Shetland Scots alone.

Scots in the Census: validity and reliabilityCaroline Macafee (read by Michael Hance)

The question testing prior to the 2001 Census raised issues of validity and reliability

in relation to a Scots language question, and although a question was finally

included in 2011, these issues have not gone away. An initial look at the patterning

of the results suggests that the term ‘Scots’ has indeed been differently understood,

to some extent, in different dialect areas and by different generations. Nevertheless,

the results show surprising reliability, in the sense of internal consistency and also

consistency with earlier small studies.

This paper is a preliminary examination of the Census data by age and

geographical area, the latter roughly aligned with the traditional dialect areas. While

the absolute figures have to be viewed with caution, the rises and falls over the age

range are informative. Shetland presents the best case scenario, but even here there

is a sharp drop-off amongst the youngest groups. Aberdeenshire and Angus are also

above the average level in the older age groups, but – as in various other areas –

there is a sharp downturn amongst people in their fifties and younger. In some

places there is a small degree of recovery amongst people in their twenties; in the

cities if there a recovery it comes in a slightly younger group. Thus we can begin to

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see where there are danger signs and where there are signs of positive educational

impacts.

William Simpson's account of the Ayrshire dialectJ. Derrick McClure

In 1811, William Simpson of Ochiltree, a friend and poetic confrère of Robert Burns,

published an account of the Ayrshire dialect, describing (though in an unsystematic

fashion) the pronunciation and giving a substantial list of distinctive vocabulary items.

This paper will complement David Murison's 1959 article "Ayrshire Speech in the

Age of Burns", which examines Simpson's account of the phonology of the dialect,

by discussing the authenticity of the Ayrshire words which he lists, investigating the

extent to which they are unique or distinctive to Ayrshire and their use by Burns and

other writers of the county.  Comparison will also be made with Burns' glossaries.   

The Field Names of SlidderyKen Mackinnon

The names of fields and other minor topography provide perspectives into the

occupance, way-of-life, land-use practices, local produce and industries, language-

use, and their changes over time in local communities. This paper applies a ‘layered-

landscape’ approach (as per John Murray 2014 Reading The Gaelic Landscape) to

the micro-toponymy of Sliddery Muir / Cnoc a’ Mhadain, in the south-west of the Isle

of Arran.

These local names have been transmitted by oral family tradition by members

of my own family still resident at the traditional home over many centuries of my own

patrilineal family. They are for the most part in Gaelic, although their transmission

has now been by at least two generations which have shifted to English as their

community speech and mother tongue. They preserve distinctive forms of

pronunciation, and of local terminology.

Sliddery Muir is located on the extreme south-western edge of the traditional

Gaidhealtachd, and the analysis of its local micro-toponymy reveals a concealed

Gaelic topocosm, or typical environment or ‘world’. Such buried ‘worlds’ underlie

much of the traditional Gaidhealtachd which has undergone societal language-shift

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over recent generations. Such studies enable much of this still to be recoverable.

Indeed such studies can even be undertaken beyond the recognised Gaidhealtachd

into parts of Scotland where it is even asserted that ‘Gaelic was never spoken here.’

It is hoped that this paper may even encourage further studies on these lines.

William Shaw, Controversial Gaelic LexicographerIseabail Macleod

Controversy struck most aspects of the life of William Shaw, not least in his role in

the anti-Ossian campaign (which has been well-described in the literature on

Macpherson and Ossian). His brief career in the Church of Scotland ended

ignominiously, as did his early teaching career; he did however end his long life as a

Church of England clergyman

A Gaelic-speaking Highlander who came to London in the 1770s, he was

considerably influenced and supported by Samuel Johnson, who encouraged him to

publish his (rather sketchy) Gaelic grammar and subsequently his Galic and English

Dictionary (1780), the first dictionary of Scottish Gaelic in conventional alphabetic

form. It was not a success and indeed gave rise to a legal case in the Court of

Session in which Shaw pursued subscribers who refused to pay on the grounds that

the quality of the Dictionary was well below what they had been led to expect. It did

however aim to preserve the language, unlike an earlier, thematic, dictionary,

published by the SSPCK in 1741 with the aim of helping schoolchildren to move from

Gaelic to English and eventually to get rid of their Gaelic.

This paper will look in particular at the language used in the Dictionary: the

Scottish and Irish content; how much influence there was from Johnson; were there

Scots elements in the English content? It will be briefly compared with other Gaelic

dictionaries of Shaw’s time.

National and local government policy and provision for ScotsRobert McColl Millar

It has been suggested that, in the past, actors in Westminster, national and local

government have attempted to make certain that Scots was ‘buried alive’ (Millar

2006). While the initiatives for Scots largely pushed forward by the Scottish

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Government and the activist movement since 2007 have demonstrated a willingness

to grapple with some of the issues connected to the language, the question remains:

to what extent has this shift in policy been successful?

Using a framework based on a critical reading of Spolsky (2004 and 2009)

and Cooper (1989), this research aims to provide a sense of change in policy

towards Scots over time, based primarily on two surveys – in 2011 and 2014 – of

local authority provision for the language. It will demonstrate that there are few

connected policy attempts: some authorities take their commitment to Scots very

seriously, while others at least appear to be giving lip service to applying policy;

some even seem still to have difficulties understanding what ‘Scots’ is. A brief

discussion will follow on similar language situations elsewhere in Europe and how

these compare to the situation in this country.

ReferencesCooper, Robert L. 1989. Language planning and social change. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Millar, Robert McColl. 2006. ‘“Burying alive”: unfocussed governmental language

policy and Scots’. Language Policy 5: 63-86.

Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

– 2009. Language Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Germanic sources of Older Scots revisited: A featural approachBenjamin Molineaux and Joanna Kopaczyk (with Rhona Alcorn, Vasilis Karaiskos,

Bettelou Los, and Warren Maguire)

Much of the work on the roots of Older Scots focuses on parallels with either West

Saxon – the best attested variety of Old English – or with the Anglian dialects

(Northumbrian and Mercian). This latter group has been considered a better

candidate, since it is more directly linked – geographically and politically – to the

Anglo-Saxon settlers of south-east Scotland. Beyond these local populations,

Germanic word-stock and features within Scots may also be traced to North

Germanic, through the Viking invasions of the 8-10 th centuries, as well as to

substantial post-Conquest migrations from Anglo-Scandinavian speaking England.

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In this talk we will attempt to trace the history of a section of the Germanic

vocabulary of Scots by reaching back to the reconstructed ancestor language

(Germanic). Our goal is to find common ground for assessing the input of the

different daughter languages and dialects into Lowland Scots. For these purposes

we choose an illustrative feature, namely the development of the vowel

reconstructed as Germanic *a, when it appears in closed-syllables. A close analysis

of some 75 lexical items containing reflexes of the target vowel in A Linguistic Atlas

of Older Scots (1380-1500) will point to three paths of development: a large degree

of continuation from Northumbrian (in stark contrast to West Saxon), several clear

outcomes of Scandinavian influence within specific phonological contexts, and an

overall competition between the Anglian and Scandinavian forms. This latter

tendency is reminiscent of processes of new dialect formation, where different layers

of the population vie for linguistic prominence. Interestingly, here the shared

Germanic features filter to the surface, although not without identifiable lexical

exceptions.

Migration and the Mither TongueTom Rendall

The dialect used in Orkney is referred to as Insular Scots. Orkney people could be

said to have become increasingly bi-dialectal, speaking an Orcadian influenced

Scottish Standard English together with Orcadian dialect of varying broadness and

strength. Demographic change has introduced people from different locations into

the county and those individuals bring with them different variants of the English

language. The population has been changing since the 1960s with people moving to

Orkney for employment, for retirement or to embark on a new lifestyle in an island

environment.

This paper will not only consider the attitudes of dialect speakers in Orkney

but will look at the perceptions of the people who have moved to the islands.

Research carried out in Orkney - as part of a project funded by Scotland’s Islands -

highlighted the degree of assimilation and integration. Comments from informants

assisted in the understanding of the attitudes towards dialect in a number of

locations throughout the islands.

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Areas of commonality and contrast with other research carried out in Shetland

and Aberdeenshire will be examined and the paper will reveal some stimulating

comments from informants on how they engage with each other in their local

communities. The views expressed by the local people and migrants indicate a level

of mutual respect for the vernacular in the islands and parishes.

The paper will address issues and questions relating to continuation of dialect

use in an ever-changing rural community. The cultural values of the Orkney dialect

will be highlighted in the conclusion to links between migration and the mither

tongue.

Creating a Historical Thesaurus of ScotsSusan Rennie and Magdalena Warth-Szczyglowska

This paper will describe a new project to create a Historical Thesaurus of Scots

(HTS), based at the University of Glasgow. The HTS will be the first thesaurus of

Scots to be organized on historical lines, and will be entirely digital. It will allow users

to explore links between words in semantic clusters, and to compare both historical

and dialectal variants of related Scots words and phrases. The project is currently in

a pilot phase, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council until September

2015, and it is hoped that this will serve as the basis for a larger project to compile

and publish a complete Historical Thesaurus of Scots online.

The Historical Thesaurus of Scots is being compiled from the data in the

Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk), which traces the development of

Scots from the twelfth to the late twentieth centuries. The HTS will therefore contain

information on over eight centuries of Scottish life as seen through the language of

Lowland Scotland. For the pilot phase, we are focussing on a number of semantic

categories which are rich in Scots vocabulary, including sports and games, weather,

food and drink, as well as an additional focus on Scots idioms. This paper will

present the initial results of our research, using a number of case studies, and will

show how we are planning to structure and represent the thesaurus data online,

including plans to incorporate crowdsourced data, such as photographs and videos,

into the project.

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The Singularly Great Power of the Pictish Royal Name ‘Onuist’ Guto Rhys

The evidence for the language of the Picts is painfully problematic on many levels

and hypotheses on its phonetic features and thus its relationship with Brittonic are

often based on severely restricted and often garbled evidence which is often open to

more than one interpretation. One such issue which has puzzled scholars for over a

century is the variance in the spellings of the Pictish name Unust (Onuist etc.).

In 1955 the eminent Celtic scholar Kenneth H. Jackson proposed that the

forms of the name Unust in the Pictish King-lists, whose best witness is the

‘Poppleton Manuscript’, indicated that Pictish was evolving on similar lines to

Brittonic albeit with a time-lag of some centuries. The evidence adduced for this was

the forms of the personal name which are attested as both Onuist and later Unuist in

this manuscript. The first element of this compound is the Celtic numeral *ojno- ‘one’.

In Brittonic languages the initial diphthong evolved as follows /oj/ > /o:/ > /u:/ > /ʉ:/. In

Brittonic the absolute chronology of these changes can be established with some

confidence. In Pictland the reigns of the two kings who both bear the name Unust

son of Uurgust can also be established. It is upon this evidence that it was argued

that the changes noted occurred some centuries later than Brittonic.

In this paper I will argue that other attestations of this name (e.g. in the

Durham Liber Vitae) do not lend weight to Jackson’s view, and that Pictish

phonology more closely followed Brittonic in this respect. The divergent spellings, I

will suggest, reflect not a change in pronunciation but a change in orthography

perhaps indicating the abandonment of a native Pictish system in favour of a more

latinate form. The impact of this is that one of the few supposedly divergent features

of Pictish cannot stand and its development may well have precisely mirrored

Brittonic.

The Scots Language in the Scottish ParliamentMaggie Scott

At the present time, new uses of the Scots language continue to emerge in the

media, in literature, and in a range of public forums. This paper will consider the uses

of the Scots language in the Chamber of the Scottish Parliament, briefly illustrated by

Matthew Fitt and James Robertson in The Smoky Smirr o Rain: A Scots Anthology

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(2003). Scots is quite frequently heard in the Chamber, and as such it is recorded in

the Official Report—and with considerable care—this is important not only because it

demonstrates the widening of contexts in which Scots is understood, but also that it

is deemed to be acceptable; Editors of the Official Report avoid anglicising legitimate

Scots words and expressions, taking advice from Scottish Language Dictionaries on

points of detail.

As the 2011 Census results demonstrate, around two-fifths of the Scottish

population profess to skills in reading, writing, speaking or understanding the Scots

language. It is therefore particularly significant that the new Scottish Parliament has

facilitated the increased visibility of the Scots language in national contexts. The

recent independence referendum has also drawn particular attention to innovative

uses of Scots, from ‘Aye’, ‘Naw’ and ‘Mibbe’ badges, to BBC TV programmes such

as ‘Blethering Referendum’. Scots is often seen as ‘political’, but the mutable

synergies between the Scots language and current Scottish politics are complex and

diverse. This paper will discuss the curious symbiosis developing between the

Scottish Parliament and the Scots language.

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