Northern and Insular Scots

This book is concerned with the Scots dialects of northern Scotland and
the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland; dialects spoken by a wide
variety of people living very different lives in divergent natural environments.

For recordings of the transcriptions in this book go to
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/dialects/nis.html

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Northern and Insular Scots 1
1.2 The linguistic ecologies of the regions 5
1.3 Geography and culture: an introduction 6
1.4 A note on terminology: ‘Scots’ versus ‘English’ 14
1.5 Conclusion 15
2 Phonetics and phonology 16
2.1 Introduction 16
2.2 The vowel systems 20
2.3 Consonant phonology 61
2.4 Prosody 64
2.5 Conclusion 64
3 Morphosyntax 65
3.1 Introduction 65
3.2 The nouns 66
3.3 Pronouns 67
3.4 The definite article 71
3.5 Adjectives 72
3.6 Verbs 72
3.7 Conclusion 78
4 Lexis 79
4.1 Introduction 79
4.2 Scholarly resources: national 79
4.3 Locally focused resources 83
4.4 Dialect vocabulary and heritage 92
4.5 Discussion 94
4.6 Lexical borrowing 95
4.7 Conclusion 102
5 History, including changes in progress 103
5.1 Introduction: language contact and language shift 103
5.2 Northern Scotland 106
5.3 The Northern Isles 123
5.4 Conclusion 135
6 Survey of previous works and annotated bibliography 136
6.1 General histories, grammars, studies of phonology
and dictionaries of Scots 136
6.2 Local history and geography 137
6.3 Studies of specific dialects 138
6.4 Theoretical views discussed in this book 139
6.5 Suggestions for future research 140
6.6 Works cited in this chapter and the book as a whole 142
7 Texts 149
7.1 Shetland 149
7.2 Orkney 162
7.3 Caithness 163
7.4 Black Isle 166
7.5 Mid-Northern B 167
7.6 Mid-Northern A 168
7.7 South Northern 171
Index 173