Links to Scots and Older Scots resources

Reference:

• Dictionary of the Scots Language With over 77,000 separate entries, over 250,000 spelling variants and over 750,000 illustrative quotations, the DSL is a treasure trove of information about the Scots language.
• A Selected Classified Bibliography of the Scots Language This website, maintained by Marina Dossena between 2003 and 2010, contains bibliographical information on Scots-related publications, mainly linguistic, following the tradition of periodic reviews initiated by A. J. Aitken and continued by Caroline Macafee, J.D. McClure and W.F.H. Nicolaisen.
• The Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster FRLSU offers a free, web-based, rigorously peer-reviewed publication series on any languages which are or have been spoken in Scotland (including the Northern Isles) and the Irish province of Ulster. The focus is mostly linguistic and sociolinguistic, usually in connection with FRLSU colloquia and conferences.

Archives:

• National Library of Scotland The National Library of Scotland is the world’s leading centre for the study of Scotland and the Scots. Check the digital gallery for the images and transcription of, among other treasures, the Auchinleck Manuscript, Chepman and Myllar prints and the collection of Scottish broadsides (1650-1910), The Word on the Street.
• 500 Years of Printing in Scotland (1508-2008) This website, celebrating the 500th anniversary of establishing the Chepman and Myllar press in Edinburgh, brings together information about the history of printing in Scotland, one of Scotland’s most significant industries and a source of information on contemporary language and culture.

Education/Advocacy:

• Scots Language Centre This is a comprehensive website on all aspects of the Scots language, including its diversity, history, cultural and social presence, education, the current events and much more. It contains texts, audio and video recordings as well as a wealth of weblinks to other Scots-related resources.
• Aye Can… Speak Scots This website was launched in preparation for the 2011 Census to promote the awareness of what the label “Scots” represents and to help people identify whether they can understand, speak, read and/or write Scots.
• The Bottle Imp The Bottle Imp, published online by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, is a journal promoting and supporting the teaching and study of Scottish literature and language.

Corpora:

• Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech The Scottish Corpora project has created large electronic corpora of written and spoken texts for the languages of Scotland. The Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) has been online since November 2004, and, after a number of updates and additions, has reached a total of nearly 4.6 million words of text, with audio recordings to accompany many of the spoken texts. A sister resource, the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, was launched in 2010, and now comprises 5.4 million words of written text with accompanying images.
• The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (1450-1700) The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots was compiled by Anneli Meurman-Solin as a supplement to the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. The Scottish texts were selected according to the same principles of sociohistorical variation analysis as the main corpus, and the computer format, parameter coding and editorial and typographical conventions are also the same. It contains 71 prose texts/samples and a collection of private and official letters (c. 834,200 words).

History:

• People of Medieval Scotland (1093-1314) This is a database of all known people of Scotland between 1093 and 1314 mentioned in over 8600 contemporary documents.

Other:

• ScottishHandwriting.com The website offers online tuition in palaeography for historians, genealogists and other researchers struggling to read manuscript historical records written in Scotland in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.