Researchers from the University of Glasgow are set to launch a major electronic archive, the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech project (SCOTS), on St Andrew's Day, 30th November 2004. St Andrews day is celebrated by Scots around the world and now Scottish people from across the globe can access a unique online collection of texts that will help instil pride in national identity.

The new accessible and publicly available resource captures the languages of Scotland by bringing together written, spoken, audio and video texts. This is the first time that such a large collection of diverse texts in the Scots language have been brought together online, and the corpus is the most detailed analysis yet of differences within language north of the border.

The resource is set to be used by researchers, teachers, and interested members of the public worldwide. Initially, 400 texts ranging from Broad Scots to Scottish English are available.

SCOTS contains a wide variety of types of text: prose, poetry, drama, essays, correspondence, business writing. Audio and video material comes complete with transcriptions, and access to the original sound or video. All texts are accompanied by cultural and social information about the text and its author.

The corpus contains a total of half a million words from all walks of life and now through virtual integration the resource brings their linguistic, historical and cultural records together to aid rapid searching of their usage.

Dr Wendy Anderson, from the Department of English Language at the University of Glasgow, said: 'SCOTS is flexible for research into questions of word survival and regional distribution, and features of grammar and pronunciation. For example we're interested in the currency of distinctively Scottish words, such as 'gallus', 'canny', 'muckle', 'sonsie' and 'braw'. All Scots know these words, indeed they are often used to stereotype the people of Scotland, but are they actually still used? By whom? Where? In what contexts? And what about the grammatical features of Scots? Some people might frown on 'yous' as a plural form of 'you', but research shows that it's overwhelmingly common in spoken language and written representations of speech.

'The online resource, which has already been three years in the making, will help instil pride about being Scottish and greatly increase Scots' self-awareness. We need to preserve information on minority languages, such as Scots, for future generations. You might say it's been a muckle and gallus undertaking.'

Scots speakers are urged to add their voices to the archive. SCOTS is an ongoing project, and to gain as accurate a picture as possible of the languages of Scotland the University of Glasgow is looking for donated, written or spoken, texts. The SCOTS project corpus is available for free at www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk from 30th November.

For more information contact: Jenny Murray, Press Officer, University of Glasgow, Tel: 0141 330 8593, Email: jennifer.murray@admin.gla.ac.uk, Tel: Dr Wendy Anderson, SCOTS Project, Department of English Language, University of Glasgow, Tel: 0141 330 2382 or 0141 330 3535

Media Relations Office (media@gla.ac.uk)

The current three-year stage of the project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB).

The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) is a venture by the Department of English Language and STELLA project at the University of Glasgow.

First published: 29 November 2004