Recent years have brought significant changes to the political situation in Scotland. This new political situation has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in the languages and culture of Scotland. On 1 July 1999, for example, in an historic address, the late Donald Dewar offered a 'handsel' to the Queen at the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. A 'handsel' is a gift intended to bring good luck to something new or to a new beginning. He was thus marking this special occasion in a traditional Scottish manner.
Scotland has a distinctive and colourful language heritage. The present-day linguistic situation in Scotland is complex, with speakers of Scottish English, Scots, Gaelic and numerous community languages making up Scottish society. However, surprisingly little reliable information is available on a variety of language issues, such as the survival of Scots, the distinguishing characteristics of Scottish English, or the use of non-indigenous languages such as Chinese and Urdu. This lack of information presents significant problems for those working in education and elsewhere.
A New Era in Language Studies
Advances in computer technology have now made it possible to store and analyse very large quantities of information in a way which would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. As a result, in recent years much research in the Humanities has focused on the building of large text archives and corpora. Such resources offer exciting opportunities to study language on a broad scale and with an accuracy which would otherwise be impossible.
The SCOTS Project
The SCOTS project is the first large-scale project of its kind for Scotland. It provides a large electronic corpus of both written and spoken texts for the languages of Scotland. It has been online since November 2004, and, after regular updates and additions, it reached a total of 4 million words of text in May 2007. It is hoped that SCOTS will allow those interested in Scotland's linguistic diversity, and in Scottish culture and identity, to investigate the languages of Scotland in new ways, and address the gap which presently exists in our knowledge of these. It will also preserve information on these languages for future generations.
For a general description of the textual content of SCOTS, please see the Details page. Full instructions for browsing and searching the corpus can be found on the Help page.
The Future
The team behind the SCOTS project is now working on a new Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, also funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, covering the period 1700-1945. This corpus will also be made freely available online in due course, and it is hoped that it will provide a valuable bridge between the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (1450-1700), and SCOTS.
Although the active phase of SCOTS has now finished, we hope to have the resources to continue to add contributed material to the online SCOTS corpus. If you wish to submit texts for either corpus, please contact us.
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