Centuries of contact between Older Scots and the Scandinavian language of Norn, coupled with geographic isolation, has resulted in the highly distinctive dialects spoken in the Orkney and Shetland Isles today. In this chapter, we document the socio-historical context which led to the formation of these dialects, and look to a range of studies which describe these dialects’ lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic forms. We note forms shared with other varieties of Scots but concentrate mostly on the highly localised features not found in mainland Scotland. In addition to broad comparisons between Orkney and Shetland, we also document the dialect diversity within each location. Finally, we turn to bidialectalism, and specifically how speakers may have access to two ‘codes’ in their linguistic repertoire, where Standard Scottish English is used alongside localised vernaculars, and how this might impact on dialect attrition in the coming years.

In this chapter we examine a number of present-day varieties of Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE). We begin by describing the Scots–SSE continuum, with its roots in earlier socio-cultural developments. We then turn to the present day, examining the attitudes towards different varieties of Scots across geographic and social dimensions. The main part of the chapter focuses on recent research on the many varieties of Scots, providing a detailed picture of the phonological and morphosyntactic forms found therein. In terms of phonology, Scots and SSE overlap, but remain divergent, especially given a number of phonological changes in Scots over the twentieth century, and continued Scots regional variation. The analysis of morphosyntax shows a core of forms shared across most varieties, including SSE, and these are largely stable. A number of other ‘home-grown’ forms are increasing in use across Scotland. Overall, our analysis shows that Scots is maintaining its own distinctive pathway in the twenty-first century.

Why are the nine years of destructive invasion and attempted conquest of Scotland unknown to English literary criticism? This chapter shows why we have forgotten this unusually brutal invasive war of 1542–1550 and why it matters to remember it. It introduces the ‘British history’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, through which English kings claimed feudal overlordship of Scotland. It shows how Henry VIII deployed Geoffrey’s history in his Declaration of 1542 to justify invasion, but also how Henry’s rhetoric and strategy disavowed any desire to conquer in the pretence that he was reluctantly forced into reminding the Scots of English overlordship. Such rhetoric, subsequently repeated and reprinted, helped both justify English claims and trivialise the war to the point of oblivion in modern English historiography. The chapter reads a neglected Scottish text by William Lamb which, opposing Henry’s claims by appealing to the law of nations, exposes the precarious fictionality of English claims to overlordship and its lack of credibility in a broader European context.

Scots, like too many other European languages, is viewed as possessing a dearth of expressivity in spite of evidence to the contrary. This chapter documents the fact that Scots possesses a wide range of forms of expressivity as part of its grammatical repertoire – including most notably echo word formations. Echo words are a type of apophonic reduplication where a root, stem, or other morphosyntactic constituent is partially reduplicated and there is a concomitant change in the echoant; the reduplicated, or copied, portion has no independent semantic value. The change in the copy portion can involve vowel ablaut, consonant alternation/substitution, or tone/register changes.

In the context of English and Spanish in contact, issues of identity arise at various levels, including: how people’s national and ethnic identities are bound up with their language choices; how the national and ethnic identities were formed historically, and are continually re-formed, in conjunction with languages; how languages themselves are defined – how the English and Spanish (or Castilian) languages came to be recognised as such, and likewise for Scots or Galician or Catalan as languages apart, where many other varieties are regarded as dialects; how contact between English and Spanish, which principally means their knowledge and use by bilinguals, affects these conceptions of languages and national and ethnic identities. This chapter examines these issues in terms not just of Spanish and English, but of Spanishes and Englishes in their global diversity, together with the other languages with which they share multilingual spaces. A wide range of recent studies on bilingual identities are taken into consideration, as is current work on the effects of globalisation, superdiversity and translanguaging.

The National Archives (Kew) contain a small trove of court records from the province of East Florida. These records indicate at least eight separate courts were in operation during the British period from 1763 to 1784. Until now, these legal papers were thought to have been lost or destroyed. They reveal an unexplored world of British and colonial American legal history. St Augustine, East Florida, was a southern colonial legal hub in the British Empire before, during, and after North American independence. This chapter examines the judges of the province and their links to Scotland, England, and British colonies to the north of the province. Allocation of legal positions in East Florida reflected extant Scottish and English networks and connections found throughout the Empire.

This chapter carries out a critical survey of early modern attitudes to English accents and dialects in order to show how effectively Shakespeare and his contemporaries activated their connotations in performance and how marked voices lent local resonance and social specificity to their characters and to the fictive world of their plays. Despite their lower prestige, English accents and dialects other than the emerging standard known as the ‘King’s English’, or ‘usual speech’, had wider and more varied dramaturgical functions than merely serving as comic caricature of specific social types. In fact, closer attention to a selection of plays – some of which are discussed at greater length in mini case-studies embedded in the central section of this chapter – produces radically new readings of well-known characters and plays, including Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor or Edgar in King Lear. This chapter also reconsiders how early modern anti-theatricalists were particularly concerned about the actor’s voice and its ability to reproduce high- and low-rank accents and phonetic registers.

This chapter introduces the various corpora used for the research and the research site.

This chapters focuses on how children acquire lexical-phonological features.

This chapter focuses on how children acquire lexical features.

This chapter focuses on how children acquire morphosyntactic features.

This chapters focuses on how children acquire phonetic features.