We are looking for a PhD candidate for the project the development of Scottish English in the 18th and 19th centuries; a view from above and below. The history of Scots, most noticeably in its written form, is marked by a process of Anglicization, i.e. the decline of Scots orthographic, grammatical and lexical features in favour of Southern English features. This process started around the late sixteenth century under the increasing cultural, economic and political dominance of England and is thought to have been largely completed in the course of the eighteenth century. Although the new written (and to some extent spoken) anglicized variety resembles English in many respects, English as used in Scotland has its own characteristic features. As a result, a complex sociolinguistic situation has emerged where Scots primarily has vernacular status, and a Scottish variety of English enjoys official prestige in both written and spoken form. As of today, there are still many questions about how and when Scottish English emerged. The aim of the project is to take a diachronic corpus approach to investigate in what respects written Scottish English differs from its English counterparts, and how and when these features developed over time. In doing so, the project aims to consider the role of prescriptive grammars, the social status of speaker-writers, region of origin, text-type and genre variation, as well as internal linguistic factors and dialect contact phenomena. The project includes the collection and digitization of 18th to 20th-century Scottish archive material to create a diachronic corpus.

Completed (Res)MA degree in linguistics

Experience with 18th and 19th-century (Scottish) paleography

Experience with digital corpus development and mark-up languages such as XML (using TEI guidelines)

Affinity with historical sociolinguistic approaches, with a particular interest in prescriptivism, language history from below, language standardization, Scottish English and Standard English

Affinity with genre and register variation studies

Excellent command of English

Preferred qualifications include affinity with the history of Scots and Scottish English