Anderson, W., ‘The SCOTS Corpus: a resource for language contact study’. Paper delivered at Language Contact and Minority Languages on the Littorals of Western Europe, University of St Andrews, 11-13 June 2004
This paper will provide an overview of the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS). SCOTS is an AHRB-funded project in the Department of English Language, University of Glasgow. It aims to build a large electronic corpus of written and spoken texts representing the languages of Scotland: in the first instance, text collection is focusing on Scots and Scottish English; subsequently it will extend to Gaelic and the non-indigenous community languages used in this complex language contact situation. The corpus will be freely available on the Internet, and is expected to provide a useful resource for researchers and anyone interested in Scottish linguistic or cultural issues. In this paper, I shall introduce the background to the project, describe the current state of the corpus, and draw attention to its relevance for research into language contact.