Who Speaks Scots Where: What Crowdsourcing Reveals

Who Speaks Scots Where: What Crowdsourcing Reveals

Dialectology has a long tradition of reaching out to the crowd to map language use across time and space (e.g. Ellis 1889). The 21st century has seen a resurgence in such studies but in contrast to the face-to-face pen and paper questionnaires targeted at a socially restricted sample of speakers in traditional dialectology, these surveys utilise online technologies to reach out to the wider voices of the crowd. While these types of studies are still in their infancy, they have the potential to address an important gap in our understanding of how language varies and changes across multiple speakers, multiple dialects and multiple variables.

In this paper, Jennifer Smith and Brian Aitken present findings from a new crowdsourced resource - Speak for Yersel (speakforyersel.ac.uk) - which sets out to map dialect use in Scots throughout Scotland. Specifically, who speaks Scots and where. They will first begin by describing the creation of Speak for Yersel and then address the issue of sampling, and how the survey participants are distributed with respect to key demographic markers - age, gender, education and region. They then turn to the areal view of Scots as afforded by Speak for Yersel, focussing on the reported use of phonetic and morphosyntactic dialect forms through time, space and the social system. The paper ends with a discussion of what crowdsourced data reveal with respect to the widely held assumptions on the Scots dialect landscape.

Biography

Brian Aitken is the Digital Humanities Research Officer for the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow and is responsible for developing, implementing, and supporting the school’s extensive collection of digital resources. In addition to developing the Speak For Yersel resources, he has been responsible for the technical development of more than fifty digital humanities research projects, including the Scots Syntax Atlas, the Historical Thesaurus of English, the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, the Anglo-Norman Dictionary and several map-based place-names projects such as the Berwickshire Place-Name Resource.

Professor Jennifer Smith graduated in Linguistics from Durham (MA) and York (PhD). Her research is in sociolinguistics and language variation and change, focussing on dialect morphosyntax, particularly in varieties of Scots. She has directed a number of ESRC, AHRC and British Academy funded projects, and has created two major digital resources for the analysis of speech patterns across Scotland, The Scots Syntax Atlas and Speak for Yersel. She was elected Fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021 and Fellow of the British Academy in 2025..

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