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

LAOS was developed by Keith Williamson. It is founded on a 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. LAOS is accessible as an interactive website. The manuscript texts are described in the ‘Index of Sources’, which is provided as a searchable database. The tagged texts and their corresponding text dictionaries can be searched by tag and / or form or by geographical area. Tagged texts can also be searched to make concordances using a lexico-grammatical tag as the key. The nature of the texts means that most are localisable on extralinguistic evidence and a set of maps displays the distribution of linguistic forms and features. Further, the time-depth of the corpus span allows the investigation of linguistic variation through time as well as across space.

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

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