Hippocrene Books, 1998. — 292 p. Scots remains a thriving language as covered in this dictionary of the most widely-used words and expressions of today. Entries are arranged within fifteen categories, which express some aspect of everyday life in Scotland (eating and drinking, people, health, law). A key is provided to indicate the various contexts (colloquial, literary etc) in...
Polygon at Edinburgh, 1999. — xli, 819 p. "The Concise Scots Dictionary" contains meanings, spelling variants, pronunciation, information on when and where words are used, grammatical information, idioms and phrases, etymologies and details of Scottish life then and now. The Concise Scots Dictionary is concerned mainly with Scots, the language of Lowland Scotland, the area...
Hippocrene Books, 1998. — 260 p. — (Hippocrene Practical Dictionary). This dictionary is a fascinating and up-to-date guide to the language that developed alongside English in the northern parts of the British Isles. In addition to introducing such well-known words as dreich, sassenach, kirk and kittle, it contains thousands of the other words that have enriched Scotland's...
Edinburgh: Polygon at Edinburgh, 1999. — 556 p. Unique subject guide to over 20,000 Scots words. Subject-by-subject access to Scots words with definitions in English. Wide-ranging coverage of different subjects including animal and plant life, farming and fishing, food and drink, emotions and character. Introduction commenting on the distinctive aspects and qualities of the...
University of Glasgow, 2018. — 54 p. Despite much research and a great variety of literature on the subject of idioms, the borders of idiomaticity seem very difficult to define. This thesis aims to study how far prototype theory can assist us in the identification of idiom. By gathering and analysing the characteristics of idioms, it is possible to extrapolate gradience where...
University of Glasgow, 2018. — 45 p. Despite much research and a great variety of literature on the subject of idioms, the borders of idiomaticity seem very difficult to define. This thesis aims to study how far prototype theory can assist us in the identification of idiom. By gathering and analysing the characteristics of idioms, it is possible to extrapolate gradience where...
Oxford University Press, 2023. — 209 p. This book provides a thorough yet approachable history of the Scots language, a close relative of Standard English with around 1.5 million speakers in Scotland and several thousand in Ireland, according to the 2011 census. Despite the long history of Scots as a language of high literature, it has been somewhat neglected and has often been...
John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1995. — 224 p. — (Varieties of English Around the World G14). Among the topics treated in this collection are the status of Scots as a national language; the orthography of Scots; the actual and potential degree of standardisation of Scots; the debt of the vocabulary of Scots to Gaelic; the use of Scots in fictional dialogue; and the...
University of Edinburgh, 2012. — 133 p. Perceptual dialectology is dedicated to the formal study of folk linguistic perceptions. Through an amalgamation of social psychology, ethnography, dialectology, sociolinguistics, cultural geography and myriad other fields, perceptual dialectology provides a methodology to gain insight to overt folk language attitudes, knowledge of...
The Mercat Press, 1983. — 84 p. David Dorward's book on Scottish place-names is a fascinating volume that offers insight and intrigue into the myriad of wonderful place-names found across Scotland. Much more than simply a dictionary of place-names, Dorward makes the subject accessible to the general reader, with explanations of hundreds of names that are clear and concise, and...
Lincom, 2005. — 76 p. — (Languages of the world: Materials 242). This book is intended as a concise and up-to-date introduction to Modern Scots, much in the vein of the classical, but now somewhat outdated textbooks by Grant & Main-Dixon (1921) and Wilson (1926). Scots is often regarded as one end of a dialect continuum that has English Standard English at the opposite end and...
Birlinn, 2012. — 208 p. This authoritative, entertaining and eminently browsable reference book, arranged in easily accessible A - Z format, is an absorbing and imaginative feast of Scottish lore, language, history and culture, from the mythical origins of the Scots in Scythia to the contemporary Scotland of the Holyrood parliament and Trainspotting. Here Tartan Tories rub...
Multilingual Matters, 1998. — 208 p. Although much work has been published on certain aspects of translation into Scots, this timely book is the first comprehensive account of Scots translations from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. From the period before Gavin Douglas's translation of the Aeneid to John Byrne's recent adaptation of Gogol's The Government Inspector, this...
Edinburgh University Press, 2006. — 320 p. The Edinburgh Companion to Scots is a comprehensive introduction to the study of older and present-day Scots language. The aim of the volume is to explain and illustrate methods of research into Scots and Scottish English. Topics include the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of contemporary speech in Scotland, and the investigation...
Edinburgh University Press, 2015. — 192 p. People have been writing in Scots for over 700 years, but the spelling of Scots has never been fixed, with many words, like buik, buke, book, appearing in a variety of forms. Drawing on the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, this volume provides a comprehensive survey of the spelling system of Older and Modern Scots, illustrating how...
Edinburgh University Press, 1997. — 294 p. — (Scottish Language and Literature). This practical introduction to ways of using theories of language to explore different aspects of Scottish literature includes material on: varieties of Scots and Scottish English; linguistic approaches to literary studies; the grammar of texts; vocabulary; metaphor; poetic metre; language in use;...
Luath Press, 2013. — 152 p. Dealing with grammar in a modern way, with modern terminology, this book gives readers an understanding of the way language works. Providing readers with the vocabulary to think about and discuss Scots, English and other Modern languages, Modren Scots Grammar fits with the Curriculum for Excellence in that it provides the grounding for readers to...
Edinburgh University Press, 2006. — 320 p. The Edinburgh Companion to Scots is a comprehensive introduction to the study of older and present-day Scots language. The aim of the volume is to explain and illustrate methods of research into Scots and Scottish English. Topics include the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of contemporary speech in Scotland, and the investigation...
Mouton de Gruyter, 1999. — 321 p. — (Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL] 27). — ISBN 3110156431, 9783110156430. This study presents a comprehensive syntactic and semantic analysis of a geographically balanced corpus of written and spoken texts, in contemporary Scots (including the author's own field recordings), amply illustrated with examples, thus making a major contribution...