First major study of Scots in almost 70 years as linguists attempt to preserve words

The first major study of the Scots language in almost 70 years is to be carried out in an effort to preserve it.

Scots speakers in both Scotland and Northern Ireland will be quizzed by researchers from the University of Aberdeen over their use of the language. Scots has 1.6 million speakers in Scotland, with more in Ulster, making it one of the largest minority languages in Europe.

However, researchers said much understanding of contemporary local and national usage is based on linguistic surveys conducted more than 60 years ago.

The team aims to establish an understanding of Scots across the generations and for men and women, as female voices and those of younger people were under-represented in the original survey.

Robert Mccoll Millar, professor in linguistics and Scottish language at Aberdeen, said his team hoped to assess how the language has changed, and how it might be preserved.

He pointed to words such as “wattrie”, meaning outside toilet and “cauldrife” – the state a domestic fire is in when the embers are barely smouldering – as words which are potentially in danger of becoming extinct.

He said: “In Scotland we have the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland and Dictionary of the Scots Language, but both draw heavily on material collated in the 1950s. In Ireland no such equivalent exists for Ulster Scots.

“The Linguistic Survey of Scots in the 1950s was groundbreaking but does it remain relevant today? This is a question we will be seeking to address. This will be the first real attempt to move towards a survey that will give us a sense of the language in the 2020s. We hope it will represent the same great leap forwards as the original survey did and can contribute greatly to our national dictionaries.”

He added: “This is a huge undertaking … To make any new survey truly representative, we need a greater understanding of what local and regional resources we have.”