A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. 260 pages
Books and Reports: Books
Professor
Robert McColl
Millar
MA (Glasg.), PhD (Lond)
Personal Chair
- Overview
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Contact Details
- Telephone
- work +44 (0)1224 273909
- r.millar@abdn.ac.uk
- Address
- The University of Aberdeen C05, Taylor Building
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 first book, System Collapse, System Rebirth: The Demonstrative Systems of English 900-1350 and the Birth of the Definite Article, was published by Peter Lang in 2000; his second, Language, Nation and Power, by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005; and his third, Northern and Insular Scots, by Edinburgh University Press in March 2007. His fourth, Trask's Historical Linguistics, was published in May 2007. In the late 2000s he edited Why Do Languages Change?, a book R.L. Trask had nearly completed at the time of his death in 2004. It was published by Cambridge University Press at the beginning of 2010. His Authority and Identity: a Sociolinguistic History of Europe before the Modern Age was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010; English Historical Sociolinguistics was published by Edinburgh University Press in May 2012. Variation and Attrition in the Scottish Fishing Communities, which he wrote with William Barras and Lisa Marie Bonnici, was published by Edinburgh University Press in June 2014. The third edition of Trask's Historical Linguistics was published by Routledge in February 2015. His eighth book, Contact: The Interaction of Closely Related Linguistic Varieties and the History of English, was published in October 2016 by Edinburgh University Press. His ninth book, Modern Scots: an analytical survey, was published by Edinburgh University Press in March 2018. His tenth book, A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland was published by Edinburgh University Press in May 2020. He has been commissioned by Oxford University Press to write The Oxford History of the Scots languge. It should be published in 2022.
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.
Professor Millar would be very interested in hearing proposals for research dealing with the history and present use of the Northern and Insular Scots dialects, the early dialects of English and the continental Germanic languages, language change due to contact, language planning and policy and the linguistic ecologies of medieval Europe.
Memberships and Affiliations
- Internal
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Robert McColl Millar coordinates research in Language and Linguistics.
- External
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Robert McColl Millar is the Editor of the Chair of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster's innovative on-line Publications series. He is also Editor of Scottish Language. He was Chair of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster from 2009 to 2017.
He is a member of the editorial board of English World-Wide, a trustee of Scottish Language Dictionaries and a member of the board of the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
- Research
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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
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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.
- Publications
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Publications
Currently viewing:Page 1 of 1 Results 1 to 34 of 34
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Contact in the History of English
Handbook of Language Contact. Hickey, R. (ed.). Wiley-Blackwell
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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Reviewing difintional ambiguities and significance of text authenticity in english language teaching
Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 1-9
Contributions to Journals: Review articles
- Digital Object Identifier
- https://doi.org/10.18510/hssr.2020.841
- Open Access
- http://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/2164/15246/1/2753_Main_Article_Text_9239_2_10_20200722.pdf
- Additional Links
- View publication in Scopus
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Modern Scots: an analytical survey
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh
Books and Reports: Books
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Before the Storm: Papers from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster triennial meeting, Ayr 2015
Publications of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster, Aberdeen. 231 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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At the forefront of linguistic change: the noun phrase morphology of the Lindisfarne Gospels
The Old English Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, Author and Context. Fernandez Cuesta, J., Pons-Sanz, S. M. (eds.). De Gruyter New York and Berlin, pp. 153-168, 16 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
- Digital Object Identifier
- https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110449105-011
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Contact: The Interaction of Closely Related Linguistic Varieties and the History of English
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. 224 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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Dialect death? The present state of the dialects of the Scottish fishing community
Current trends in Historical Sociolinguistics. Russi, C. (ed.). de Gruyter Open, pp. 143-164, 22 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
- Digital Object Identifier
- https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110488401-010
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Language and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century: Nynorsk and Scots in Comparative Context
Scandinavica, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 6-42
Contributions to Journals: Articles
- Additional Links
- View publication in Scopus
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Trask's Historical Linguistics
Routledge, Abingdon. 391 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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Change in the Fisher Dialects of the Scottish East Coast: Peterhead as a Case Study
Sociolinguistics in Scotland. Lawson, R. (ed.). Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 241-257, 16 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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Lexical Variation and Attrition in the Scottish Fishing Communities
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. 200 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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Terms for fish in the dialects of Scotland's east coast fishing communities: Evidence for lexical attrition
Scottish Language, vol. 30, pp. 29-59
Contributions to Journals: Articles
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‘“To bring my language near to the language of men”? Dialect and dialect use in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: some observations’
Scots: Studies in its Literature and Language. Kirk, J. M., Macleod, I. (eds.). Rodopi, pp. 73-87, 15 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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English Historical Sociolinguistics
Edinburgh University Press. 220 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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Social History and the Sociology of Language
The Handbook Of Historical Sociolinguistics. Hernández-Campoy, J. M., Conde-Silvestre, J. C. (eds.). Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 41-60, 20 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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The Problem of Reading Dialect in Semiliterate Letters: The Correspondence of the Holden Family, 1812-16 and of Richard Taylor 1840-51
Letter Writing in Late Modern English. Dossena, M., Del Lungo Camiciotti, G. (eds.). John Benjamins Pub., pp. 163-177, 15 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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The death of Orkney Norn and the genesis of Orkney Scots
Scottish Language, vol. 29, no. 2012, pp. 16-36
Contributions to Journals: Articles
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Varieties of English: Scots
Historical Linguistics of English. Bergs, A., Brinton, L. (eds.). Moutin de Gruyter, pp. 1951-1960, 10 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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After the Storm: Papers from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster triennial meeting, Aberdeen 2012
Vol. 4, Publications of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster. 298 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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Applied Linguistics, Global and Local: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics, 9-11 September 2010, University of Aberdeen
Scitsiugnil Press, London. 417 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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Linguistic democracy?
Sustaining Minority Language Connubities: Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland. Kirk, J., O Baoill, D. (eds.). Clo Ollscoil na Banriona, pp. 218-224, 7 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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An historical national identity?: the case of Scots
Language and Identities. Watt, D., Llamas, C. (eds.). Edinburgh University Press, pp. 247-256, 10 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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Authority and identity: a sociolinguistic history of Europe before the modern age
Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, United Kingdom. 247 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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Linguistic marginality in Scotland: Scots and the Celtic languages
Marginal Dialects: Scotland, Ireland and Beyond. Millar, R. M. (ed.). University of Aberdeen, pp. 5-17, 13 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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Marginal Dialects: Scotland, Ireland and Beyond
University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom. 222 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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Northern Light, Northern Words: Selected Papers from the FRLSU Conference, Kirkwall 2009
University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom. 219 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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The Origins of the Northern Scots Dialects
Studies in English and European Historical Dialectology. Dossena, M., Lass, R. (eds.). 1 edition. Peter Lang Pub., pp. 191-208, 18 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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History of Morphology
Blackwell Companion to the History of the English Language. Momma, H., Matto, M. (eds.). Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 43-56, 13 pages
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
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The origins and development of Shetland dialect in light of dialect contact theories
English World-Wide , vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 237-267
Contributions to Journals: Articles
- Digital Object Identifier
- https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.29.3.02mil
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Northern and Insular Scots
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK. 178 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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Trask's Historical Linguistics
Hodder Arnold, London, UK. 514 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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“Burying alive”: unfocussed governmental language policy and Scots
Language Policy, vol. 5, pp. 63-86
Contributions to Journals: Articles
- Digital Object Identifier
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-005-5626-6
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Language, Nation and Power
Palgrave Macmillan. 232 pages
Books and Reports: Books
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