Scots and its Literature

Varieties of English Around the World #G14

by J. Derrick McClure

Among the topics treated in this collection are the status of Scots as a national language; the orthography of Scots; the actual and potential degree of standardisation of Scots; the debt of the vocabulary of Scots to Gaelic; the use of Scots in fictional dialogue; and the development of Scots as a poetic medium in the modern period. All fourteen articles, written and published between 1979 and 1988, have been extensively revised and updated. J. Derrick McClure is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Aberdeen University and a well-known authority on the history of Scots.

224 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

J. Derrick McClure, M.A. (Glasgow), M.Litt. (Edinburgh), is a Senior Lecturer (now part-time) in the Department of English, University of Aberdeen. He was educated at Ayr Academy.

McClure's publications include Why Scots Matters (1988, revised 1997), Scots and its Literature (1995), Language, Poetry and Nationhood (2000),Doric: the Dialect of North-East Scotland in the Varieties of English Around the World series (2002), the chapter English in Scotland in the Cambridge History of the English Language (Vol. 5), and over eighty articles on Scottish linguistic and literary topics in various journals, festschrifts and conference proceedings volumes.

He is Chairman of the Forum for Research in the Languages of Scotland and Ulster, and member of the Scottish Parliamentary Cross-Party Group on the Scots Language, the Language Committee and the International Committee of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, the Scottish Dictionaries Council and the steering committee of the National Library of Scotland's Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (BOSLIT); he is also Editor of the annual journal Scottish Language.

His recent and current research and publication are principally on Scots as a medium for literary translation and on Middle Scots poetic prosody. Poetic translations include Scotland o Gael an Lawlander (1996), the Scots versions in Meas air Chrannaibh, Fruit on Brainches by Aonghas Pïdraig Caimbeul, Stornoway (2007), and translations from (among others) Cecco Angiolieri, Frïdric Mistral and Alfred Kolleritsch.