Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Social class and the rise of Scottish Standard English: Insights from a corpus of poor relief petitions
- Date
- Friday 5 December 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.24
Abstract
The rise and decline of written Scots, and the gradual Anglicization of (mostly) elite writing practices in Scotland, have been widely discussed in the literature (e.g., Romaine 1982; Devitt 1989; Meurman-Solin 1993, 1997; Dossena 2005).
Scots held prestige as an official written language between the 14th and 16th centuries, before political and cultural realignments prompted a shift toward southern English norms (Bugaj 2004). By the late 18th century, upper- and middle-class writers predominantly adopted an anglicised model, yet continued to employ recognisably Scottish features. The development of this hybrid written (and spoken) variety, later termed Scottish Standard English (SSE; Aitken, 1979), has been explained in various ways: from socially aspirational but incomplete acquisition of English norms to identity-driven retention of Scottish features (Millar 2020; Aitken, 1979), as well as writers’ pragmatic movement along a Scots–English continuum (Dossena, 2002).
Despite extensive scholarship on the Anglicization of Scots, and despite detailed observations on present-day Scottish Standard English (e.g., Miller 2004; Schützler et al. 2017; Schützler & Herzky 2020), relatively few empirical historical studies shed light on the social and historical roots of SSE. Research often concentrates on the period of Anglicization and subsequently tends to focus on how speaker-writers navigate Scots and English on a continuum of low and high status respectively, while reality is often much more complex and obscures the possibility that writers were not merely shifting up and down a continuum, but were also shaping a stable written variety with its own norms (cf. Schützler et al. 2017). As such, from a historical perspective, SSE itself is rarely examined as a developing variety in its own right. What is more, though SSE pronunciation and lexis have received some attention, systematic studies of morpho-syntactic variation are limited (Jones 1993).
Compounding this issue, most historical accounts rely heavily on material produced by socially privileged writers. Limited literacy and uneven manuscript preservation have long restricted access to linguistic practices across all layers of society, leaving the role of the lower classes in processes of standardisation, and their interaction with emerging SSE norms, largely unexplored.
A newly compiled corpus of 18th- and 19th-century pauper letters and poor relief petitions from various regions of Scotland (ScotPP) provides a unique glimpse into the use of Scots and SSE by lower-class writers. This talk explores prospects and challenges of using pauper petitions for historical sociolinguistic research and presents a few case studies that illustrate how these writers navigated Scots, emerging SSE norms, and continuing pressures of convergence on the southern English prestige variety. By comparing morpho-syntactic patterns in ScotPP to those in middle- and upper-class materials in existing corpora such as the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW), the talk aims to shed new light on processes of standardisation from below and to gain a better understanding of the historical and social roots of SSE.
References
- Aitken, A. J. (1979). Scottish Speech: a historical view, with special reference to the Standard English of Scotland. In Aitken, A.J. and T. McArthur. (eds.) Languages of Scotland (pp. 85-118). Chambers
- Bugaj, J. (2004). Middle Scots as an emerging standard and why it did not make it. Scottish Language 23, 19-34.
- CMSW = Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing. Compiled by John Corbett, Jeremy Smith, Wendy Anderson, Jennifer Bann, David Beavan, and Jean Anderson (2007). Available online at https://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/cmsw/.
- Devitt, A.(1989). Standardising written English: Diffusion in the case of Scotland, 1520–1659. Cambridge University Press.
- Dossena, M. (2002). A strong Scots accent of the mind: The pragmatic value of code-switching between English and Scots in private correspondence–A historical overview. Linguistica eFilologia, 14, 103-127.
- Dossena, M. (2005). Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary. “Like Runes upon a Standin’ Stane?”. John Donald.
- Dossena, M. (2013). Ego Documents in Scottish Corpora: The Contribution of Nineteenth-century Letters and Diaries to the Study of Language History. In W. Anderson (Ed.). Language in Scotland (pp. 91-111). Brill.
- Jones, C. (1993). Scottish Standard English in the Late Eighteenth Century. Transactions of the Philological Society, 91(1). 95-131. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-968X.1993.tb01066.x
- Millar, R. M. (2020). A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland. Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474448567
- Miller, J. E. (2004). Scottish English: Morphology and syntax. In Bernd. Kortmann & Edgar Schneider (eds.), A handbook of varieties of English, 47-72. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Meurman-Solin, A. (1993). Variation and change in early Scottish prose: Studies based on the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
- Meurman-Solin, A. (1994). On the evolution of prose genres in Older Scots. Nowele 23, 91–138.
- Romaine, S. (1982). Socio-historical linguistics: Its status and methodology. Cambridge University Press
- Schützler, O., Gut, U. & Fuchs, R. (2017). New perspectives on Scottish Standard English: Introducing the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English. In Sylvie. Hancil & Joan. Beal (eds.), Perspectives on Northern Englishes, 273-302. De Gruyter.
- Schützler, O., & Herzky, J. (2020). Modal verbs of strong obligation in Scottish Standard English. English Language and Linguistics. 26(1), 133-159. doi:10.1017/S1360674321000071
- ScotPP = Scottish Poor Petitions Corpus. Compiled by Moragh Gordon, Jelena Prokic, Hester Groot, and Alma Strakova [in preparation].