Professor Robert McColl Millar

Biography

Robert McColl Millar is Professor in Linguistics and Scottish Language.  He has published widely on the interface between Gaelic and Scots in Northern Scots, lexical attrition in Modern Scots, rapid language change and its connection with attitudes in modern Scotland, language policy towards Scots, the connection between language standardisation and the development of the nation state and the sociology of language. His books include 

System Collapse, System Rebirth: The Demonstrative Systems of English 900-1350 and the Birth of the Definite Article (Peter Lang, 2000)

Language, Nation and Power (2005) 

Northern and Insular Scots, (2007) 

Authority and Identity: a Sociolinguistic History of Europe before the Modern Age  (2010)

English Historical Sociolinguistics (2012)

Variation and Attrition in the Scottish Fishing Communities, with William Barras and Lisa Marie Bonnici (2014)

Contact: The Interaction of Closely Related Linguistic Varieties and the History of English (2016)

Modern Scots: an analytical survey (2018) 

A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland (2020)

The Oxford History of the Scots language (contracted to Oxford University Press)

He is Editor of Scottish Language, a member of the editorial board of English World-Wide, of the Steering Committee of the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and a trustee of Scots Language Dictionaries. He is also series editor for a refereed online series, Publications of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster. If you would like to propose a volume, please get in touch with him at the e-mail address above. He was Chair of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster from 2009 to 2017.

Over the last fifteen years, Professor Millar has supervised almost 25 successful doctoral theses, ranging from language teaching, through language contact to the use of language in eighteenth century Scotland. 

Research Overview

A complete record of Millar's publications can be found here.

Current Research

Professor Millar  has a long-standing interest in the ways in which the languages of Europe have gained full literate expression. He is also continuing work on close-relative contact, reassessing his discussion of the development of Shetland Scots.

From 2008-11 he was principal investigator for a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for aproject to investigate lexical change in the dialects of the Scottish fishing communities. The first book related to this project, Variation and Attrition in the Scottish Fishing Communities, was published in May 2014.

He has also been working on the language of letters to and from convicts transported to New South Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century. The corpus is comprised of letters to and from Thomas Holden and from Richard Taylor.

In 2007 he was asked to write an introduction to a new printing of Hugh Marwick's Orkney Norn. This publication now appears to have been abandoned, so the introduction is available here.

In late May 2018 he gave a lecture entitled Scots as a Sociolinguistic Entity at the University of Giessen. The attached represents some suggested references and readings.

In this document can be found a full transcription and translation of 'Donald's letter', as discussed in A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland.

Teaching Responsibilities

Robert McColl Millar will teach on the following courses in Half Session 1 of 2020-2021:

LN2008 Language in Society

LN3013 Language Change: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches

LN4004 Language Contact and Change in Language

LN4012 Dissertation in Language and Linguistics. 

During the teaching term (beginning 28 September), he will be available on Mondays and Thursdays between 0900 and 1600

To find out his availability at a particular time, please consult

https://mccollmillar.youcanbook.me

If you sign up for a time there, he will then respond with an invitation to a virtual meeting.