Spelling Scots ─ The Orthography of Literary Scots, 1700-2000

People have been writing in Scots for over 700 years, but the spelling of Scots has never been fixed, with many words, likebuik, 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 this orthographic system has developed partly in response to historical shifts in pronunciation, and partly as a result of social and political change.

Spelling Scots acts not only as a wide-ranging reference book to the changing orthography of Scots, but also as an outline of the active interventions in the practices that have guided Scots spelling. The book shows how canonical writers of poetry and fiction in Scots from 1700 to the present day have blended convention and innovation in presenting Scots in literary texts, and it explores the influence of key writers such as Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns, Scott, Hogg and Stevenson. Introducing an innovative method of tracing the use of key spelling variants in a corpus of Scots writing, the book discusses the implication of this method for promoting wider literacy in Scots.

Spelling Scots should be a standard reference volume for all institutions where literature in Scots is studied. It draws on the authors' current research project, the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing.

Jennifer Bann is a postdoctoral research assistant on the AHRC-funded 'Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing' project.John Corbett is Professor of English at the University of Macau and a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Language and Scottish Literature (1997) and he co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to Scots (2003).