The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) is an ongoing project in the Department of English Language, University of Glasgow. The ultimate aim of the project is to create a large electronic corpus of both written and spoken texts for the languages of Scotland, which will reflect the linguistic situation in current-day Scotland. The corpus will be freely accessible and searchable on the Web.
A corpus such as this of course can have any number of applications: in addition to studies of language contact, corpus methodology makes possible various types of self-contained investigation into the lexis, grammar, phraseology, pragmatics etc., of the languages of Scotland. The aim of this paper is to introduce the corpus, and highlight some of its possible applications in the study of language contact. Contact has been historically important for the languages of Scotland, and this is no less true today: I hope therefore to suggest ways in which the resource will be valuable for such research in the very near future
