A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, 1380-1500 (Version 1.1 — Upgraded 2024)

LAOS was developed by Keith Williamson. It is founded on a diplomatically transcribed corpus of texts written in Early and Early Middle Scots, comprising legal documents in the form of charters and record books, both civil and ecclesiastical. As with LAEME, the texts have been lexico-grammatically tagged to provide a high level of linguistic detail. The nature of the texts means that most are localisable on extralinguistic evidence, thus allowing us to map the distribution of linguistic forms and features. Further, the time-depth of the corpus span allows for the investigation of linguistic variation through time as well as across space.

LAOS is accessible as an interactive website which was upgraded in 2024 to encode all materials using TEI-standards for XML files. The 1,241 texts in the corpus are viewable via the Index of Sources, through links to HTML-based transcriptions and metadata. The nearly 350,000 words of the corpus, as well as their grammatical information can be searched via the ‘tagged data’ and ‘concordances’ search forms which provide results as exportable tables. The corpus can also be searched via our mapping tool, which allows users to produce custom downloadable maps visualising the distribution of lexical, grammatical and spelling features. The tool also includes almost 600 pre-determined maps, based on a number of previously-researched or dialectologically interesting features contained in the Atlas.  Further details on how to conduct searches can be found under the ‘documentation’ tab in the project’s main page.

A revised version of LAOS is in development (2015). A corpus of literary texts, co-eval with the current LAOS corpus of local documents is also in progress.

The compilation of LAOS was funded by AHRC grant numbers AN5021/APN11064 (for period 2000-2003) and AN10105/APN16240 (for period 2003-2006).

The legacy website for LAOS (up to 2024) is available here.