Corbett, J. and Anderson, W., ‘Using it or losing it? Scots and younger speakers’. Paper delivered to Sustaining Minority Language Communities, 7th Language & Politics Symposium, Queen's University Belfast, 9 November 2007
This paper explores the role of the corpus created by the AHRC-funded Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) project as a resource to sustain a language community. SCOTS is a multimedia resource, containing 4 million words of written and spoken texts. We demonstrate how the corpus' integrated search tools can be used to define sub-corpora of texts, representing for example the language of parent-child interaction and the speech of university students. These sub-corpora can be investigated to reveal the typical features of particular text types and the respective roles of Scottish English and Scots in speaker interaction. In turn, the data can be exploited in the creation of activities to encourage the production of Scots lexis, such as evaluative terms, by learners.