122224 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper (2018W)

In the medieval period, until 1603, it can be convincingly claimed that Scots (what linguists nowadays refer to as Middle Scots) was a fully-fledged linguistic system, which functioned quite independently of Middle English as the language of an independent nation state. Many texts in Middle Scots have survived, included parliamentary as well as municipal documents, and a powerful body of fine poetry, arguably the best between Chaucer and Shakespeare. Middle Scots developed out of northern Anglo-Scandinavian Early Middle English, with which it shared many features, so that for some linguists Middle Scots and Middle English never fully diverged. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603, followed by the Union of Parliaments in 1707, Scots underwent a process of asymmetrical convergence with English, with (by now relatively standardized) English gradually becoming the ‘high’ language for all official purposes. Scots remained a vigorous spoken tongue, the vehicle of a rich folk culture. However, since the eighteenth century the revival of Scots as a literary language has been copiously and richly sustained right up to the present day. It was as a literary language that Scots almost certainly gained recognition in 2001 under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Scots accents, however, have retained their separateness of system, accompanying the imported standardised English as well as local dialect or folk speech. For one leading authority, Scots has been “more than a dialect but less than a language”. For another it is a Halbsprache.

Thus the status of Scots throughout its development and right up to the present day will be a recurrent theme of this seminar. As evidence for its status, a great many literary and also non-literary texts as well as corpora and online material will be used. An abiding theme will be the identification of the languageness of Scots.

The seminar will provide a solid basis and understanding for a wide a range of possible assignment topics, ranging from the purely linguistic, to literary-stylistic, to Sprachpolitik, and so on. Each assignment should ideally have an empirical textual basis which after analysis and description critical insights into the questions such as the languageness (or dialecticity) of Scots will be addressed. For lovers of Scotland and/or Scottish literature, this should peove the perfect seminar!