Robert McColl Millar
MA (Gla), PhD (London)

Reader in Linguistics, Robert McColl Millar began his career as an historical linguist, with especial focus on the 'transition period' between Old and early Middle English. This remains one of his primary interests. He has also published widely on language contact in northern Scotland, lexical attrition in Scots and language attitudes towards Gaelic and Scots expressed in the Statistical Accounts of Scotland. In recent years he has become increasingly involved in the discussion of the manners in which historical, political and cultural processes relate to the development of regional and national language varieties, and in the notion of cultural (and linguistic) hybridity. In 2007 he received a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to research lexical attrition and change in the Scottish fishing communities. Material from this study is presently being prepared for publication. In 2010 he published Authority and Identity: a Sociolinguistic History of pre- Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan). He is presently completing English Historical Sociolinguistics, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2011.

Before arriving in Aberdeen in 1996, he held academic posts in Canada, Finland, Austria and Norway. A member of the Philological Society and the Societas Linguistica Europea, he is on the editorial board of English World-Wide . He is Chair of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster and the General Editor of that organisation's Peer-Reviewed Internet Series.

He is the Undergraduate Programme Co-ordinator for Language and Linguistics in the School of Language & Literature.

Dr Millar would be particularly interested in supervising postgraduate study on

• changes in English inflectional morphology
• contact between closely related language varieties and its effect on the nature of linguistic change
• language identity and change in the Northern Isles and the North of Scotland
• the nature and effects of language standardisation and planning
• the relationship between politics and linguistic identity
• language planning and policy in northern Europe
• language development in the early Middle Ages

publications since 1999

books

• 2010. Authority and Identity: a Sociolinguistic History of Europe before the Modern Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
• 2007. Northern and Insular Scots. Edinburgh University Press.
• 2007. Trask's Historical Linguistics. London: Hodder Arnold.
• 2005. Language, Nation and Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2000. System Collapse, System Rebirth: The Demonstrative Systems of English 900-1350 and the Birth of the Definite Article. Bern and Oxford: Lang.

edited collections

• 2010. Marginal dialects in Scotland, Ireland and Beyond. Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster.
• 2010. Northern Light, Northern Words. Selected Papers from the FRLSU Conference, Kirkwall 2009. Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster.

revisions

• 2010. Completion of: Trask, R.L., Why Do Languages Change? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

articles and essays

• Social Language History and Macrosociolinguistics. Forthcoming in Hernández-Campoy, J.M. and J.C. Conde-Silvestre (eds.) The Handbook Of Historical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• The Problem of Reading Dialect in Semiliterate Letters: The Correspondence of the Holden Family, 1812-16 and of Richard Taylor 1840-51. Forthcoming in Dossena, Marina (ed.) Correspondence in the Late Modern Period
• ‘To bring my language near to the language of men’? Dialect and dialect use in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: some observations. Forthcoming in Kirk, John M. and Iseabail MacLeod (eds.) A Festschrift for J. Derrick McClure.
• Scots. Forthcoming in Bergs, Alexander and Laurel Brinton (eds.) HSK - Historical Linguistics of English. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• 2011. Linguistic democracy? In Kirk, John M. and Donall Ó Baóill (eds.) Sustaining Minority Language Communities: Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona. 218-24.
• 2010. Linguistic marginality in Scotland: Scots and the Celtic languages. In Millar, Robert McColl (ed.) 2010. Marginal Dialects: Scotland, Ireland and Beyond. Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster. 5-17
• 2010. An historical national identity? The case of Scots. Forthcoming in Llamas, Carmen and Dominic Watt (eds.) Language and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 247-56.
• 2009. Dislocation: is it presently possible to envisage an economically based Language Policy for Scots in Scotland? Forthcoming in Kirk, John M. and Donall Ó Baóill (eds.) Language and Economic Development: Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona. 186-95.
• 2009. The Origins of the Northern Scots Dialects. In Dossena, Marina and Roger Lass (eds.) Studies in English and European Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang. 191-208.
• 2008. The origins and development of Shetland dialect in light of dialect contact theories. English World-Wide 29: 237-67.
• 2006 'Burying alive': unfocussed governmental language policy and Scots. Language Policy. 5: 63-86.
• 2006 History of Morphology. In Momma, Haruko & Matto, Michael (eds.). Blackwell Companion to the History of the English Language. Oxford: Blackwell. 43-56.
• 2006 On the cusp: Antoine Meillet as a sociologist of language. Forthcoming in Love, Nigel (ed.). Language and History. Integrationist Perspectives. Routledge Advances in Communication and Linguistic Theory 4. London and New York: Routledge. 99-119.
• 2004 Kailyard, conservatism and Scots in the Statistical Account of Scotland. In Kay, Christian J., Hough, Carole & Wotherspoon, Irené (eds.). New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics, Volume II: Lexis and Transmission. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 252. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 163-76.
• 2004 Linguistic history on the margins of the Germanic-speaking world: some preliminary thoughts. In McClure, J. Derrick (ed.). Doonsin' Emerauds: New Scrieves anent Scots and Gaelic. Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics 11. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona. 3-17.
• 2003 'Blind attachment to inveterate custom'. Language Use, Language Attitude and the Rhetoric of Improvement in the first Statistical Account. In Dossena, Marina & Jones, Charles (eds.). Insights into Late Modern English. Linguistic Insights 7. Bern: Peter Lang. 311-30.
• 2002 After Jones: some thoughts on the final collapse of the grammatical gender system in English. In Fisiak, Jacek (ed.). Studies in English Historical Linguistics and Philology: A Festschrift for Akio Oizumi. Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 2. Bern: Peter Lang. 293-306.
• 2002 Language, Genre, and Register: factors in the use of simple demonstrative forms in the South-West Midlands of the thirteenth century. In Allen, Rosamund, Perry, Lucy & Roberts, Jane (eds.). LaZamon: Contexts, Language, and Interpretation. King's College London Medieval Studies 19. London: King's College London Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies. 227-39.
• 2000 Some suggestions for explaining the origin and development of the definite article in English. In Fischer, Olga, Rosenbach, Anette & Stein, Dieter (eds.). Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English. Studies in Language Companion Series 53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 275-310.
• 2000 (with the assistance of Dauvit Horsbroch) Covert and Overt Language Attitudes to the Scots Tongue expressed in the Statistical accounts of Scotland. In Kastovsky, Dieter & Mettinger, Arthur (eds.). The History of English in a Social Context: a Contribution to Historical Sociolinguistics. Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 129. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 169-98.
• Reviews in English World-Wide, English Language and Linguistics, Journal of Germanic Linguistics, Journal of Scottish Place-Name Studies, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language, LinguistList, Notes and Queries and Scottish Language.

contact details

School of Language & Literature

University of Aberdeen

Taylor Building (C05)

King's College

Old Aberdeen AB24 3UB

Scotland

Tel: 01224 273909

Fax: 01224 272624

e-mail: r.millar@abdn.ac.uk