Who Speaks Scots Where: What Crowdsourcing Reveals

In-person

Dialectology has a long tradition of reaching out to the crowd to map language use across time and space (e.g. Ellis 1889). The 21st century has seen a resurgence in such studies, but in contrast to the face-to-face pen and paper questionnaires targeted at a socially restricted sample of speakers in traditional dialectology, these surveys utilise online technologies to reach out to the wider voices of the crowd. While these types of studies are still in their infancy, they have the potential to address an important gap in our understanding of how language varies and changes across multiple speakers, multiple dialects and multiple variables.

In this paper, Jennifer and Brian present findings from a new crowdsourced resource - Speak for Yersel (speakforyersel.ac.uk) - which sets out to map dialect use in Scots throughout Scotland. Specifically, who speaks Scots and where. They will begin by describing the creation of Speak for Yersel and then address the issue of sampling, and how the survey participants are distributed with respect to key demographic markers - age, gender, education and region. They will then turn to the areal view of Scots as afforded by Speak for Yersel, focusing on the reported use of phonetic and morphosyntactic dialect forms through time, space and the social system. The paper will end with a discussion of what crowdsourced data reveal with respect to the widely held assumptions on the Scots dialect landscape.