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Title: «Ane end of an auld song?»

«Ane end of an auld song?»

Macro and Micro Perspectives on Written Scots in Correspondence during the Union of the Parliaments Debates

by Sarah van Eyndhoven (Author)
©2025 Monographs XX, 268 Pages
Linguistics
Series: Historical Sociolinguistics, Volume 8

Summary

This book examines the relationship between political identity and variation from a diachronic perspective, and how vernacular features could index political and ideological affiliations. Specifically, it explores the use of written Scots in the correspondence of Scottish politicians active during the Union of the Parliaments debates at the turn of the eighteenth century. Drawing from the frameworks of First, Second and Third Wave perspectives on variation, and combining macro-social statistical modelling with microsocial analysis, broad socio-political factors are empirically investigated alongside plausible stylistic intentions in conditioning observed linguistic behaviour. Detailing the process of building a corpus, identifying relevant Scots features, and presenting analyses across time, sociolinguistic factors, and individual recipients, this volume provides the first in-depth quantitative and sociolinguistic examination of early modern Scots and its expanding indexical roles.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Half Title
  • Series Page
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • Epigraph
  • Contents
  • List of Figures
  • List of Tables
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgements
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 ‘For the Union makes us strong?’: Cause, concern and consequence in the lead up to the Union of the Parliaments
  • The pre-Union years
  • Economics and the Darien scheme
  • Religious factors
  • Presbyterians, Episcopalians and the Revolution of 1689
  • Jacobitism
  • The Hanoverian succession
  • The progression of the Union treaty
  • The Scottish political parties
  • The Court party
  • The Country party
  • The Squadrone Volante
  • Scottishness and identity
  • Chapter 2 ‘A small intermixture of provincial peculiarities may, perhaps, have an agreeable effect’: Scots, its history and its status by 1700
  • What is ‘Scots’?
  • The early beginnings of Scots, 500–1400
  • The rise to standardisation, 1400–1600
  • The Anglicisation of Scots, 1560–1707
  • The arrival of the printing press
  • Religious upheavals
  • The Union of the Crowns, 1603
  • The eighteenth century and the Union of the Parliaments, 1707
  • Scots today and the politicisation of language
  • Concluding remarks
  • Chapter 3 ‘Using the present to explain the past?’ Historical sociolinguistics, the Three Waves and political identity as tools for diachronic corpus investigation
  • The ‘Three Waves’ of sociolinguistic research
  • The First Wave or attention to speech
  • The Second Wave or audience design
  • The Third Wave and stylistic variation
  • Combining the waves
  • Variation and politics in the eighteenth century
  • Politics, identity and variation
  • Chapter 4 From documents to database: The identification, digitisation and compilation of archival material into a text-searchable novel corpus
  • Correspondence: The text type
  • The political players
  • The source material
  • The Scottish History Society publications
  • The archives
  • Digitisation
  • Transkribus
  • Metadata
  • POLITECS
  • LaBB-CAT
  • LIWC
  • Identifying Scots
  • Classifying Scots
  • MATE
  • PART
  • OEa – Old English ā
  • a-o
  • Front vowel merger
  • er-ar
  • i-e
  • ie-y
  • Northern fronting
  • u-w
  • MOUTH
  • ch-gh
  • dg-g
  • qu(h)-wh
  • ng~n
  • s~sh
  • Consonant deletion
  • Lexical and ‘Other’ items
  • Data analysis
  • Chapter 5 ‘We can never expect a more favourable juncture for completing this Union, than at present’: Frequencies of Scots during and beyond the Union debates
  • VNC
  • The theory
  • The model
  • The rise in tensions to 1705
  • The development of the Squadrone Volante
  • Chapter 6 MCA and brms: A two-fold statistical approach to multifactor regression analysis of historical written Scots use and the role of political identity
  • Bayesian modelling
  • GLMER vs BRMS
  • The theory
  • Bayesian vs frequentist modelling
  • Multiple correspondence analysis (MCA)
  • The theory
  • The MCA model
  • Combining MCA and brms
  • Factor biplots
  • Summary
  • Chapter 7 ‘I think I have quite wearied you and almost myself too by soe long a scroll’: A micro-analysis into intra-writer variation and the role of political and stylistic goals in written Scots use
  • George Lockhart of Carnwath
  • Proportions and letters
  • John Erskine, Earl of Mar
  • Proportions and letters
  • John Hay, Second Marquess of Tweeddale
  • Proportions and letters
  • Robert Wodrow
  • Proportions and letters
  • Concluding thoughts
  • Chapter 8 Eighteenth-century written Scots through macro and micro perspectives
  • Chapter 9 Swansong or key-change? Concluding thoughts on written Scots at the turn of the century
  • Bibliography
  • Appendices

Historical Sociolinguistics

Series editors

Nils Langer Stephan Elspaß Joseph Salmons Wim Vandenbussche

Vol. 8

For Lynn, for sparking my love of Scots, encouraging my academic dreams and cheering me across the finish line.

Go Little Book, go spare no pains Go take thy Fate ’mongst Great and Small: Go Smite, go pierce them Heart and Reigns Convince, or then, Confound them all.

Contents

  1. List of Figures

  2. List of Tables

  3. Preface

  4. Acknowledgements

  5. List of Abbreviations

  6. Introduction

  7. chapter 1 ‘For the Union makes us strong?’: Cause, concern and consequence in the lead up to the Union of the Parliaments

  8. chapter 2 ‘A small intermixture of provincial peculiarities may, perhaps, have an agreeable effect’: Scots, its history and its status by 1700

  9. chapter 3 ‘Using the present to explain the past?’ Historical sociolinguistics, the Three Waves and political identity as tools for diachronic corpus investigation

  10. chapter 4 From documents to database: The identification, digitisation and compilation of archival material into a text-searchable novel corpus

  11. chapter 5 ‘We can never expect a more favourable juncture for completing this Union, than at present’: Frequencies of Scots during and beyond the Union debates

  12. chapter 6 MCA and brms: A two-fold statistical approach to multifactor regression analysis of historical written Scots use and the role of political identity

  13. chapter 7 ‘I think I have quite wearied you and almost myself too by soe long a scroll’: A micro-analysis into intra-writer variation and the role of political and stylistic goals in written Scots use

  14. chapter 8 Eighteenth-century written Scots through macro and micro perspectives

  15. chapter 9 Swansong or key-change? Concluding thoughts on written Scots at the turn of the century

  16. Bibliography

  17. Appendices

Figures

  1. Figure 4.1 Example image of transcription pane following line segmentation.

  2. Figure 4.2 Example image of the search matrix in the POLITECS corpus.

  3. Figure 5.1 VNC dendrogram showing proportions of Scots variants over time.

  4. Figure 6.1 MCA plot showing similarity distances between predictor levels.

  5. Figure 6.2 MCA plot showing similarity distances between predictors.

  6. Figure 6.3 Output of brms model with MCA dimensions.

  7. Figure 6.4 Posterior distributions for brms model run using MCA dimensions.

  8. Figure 6.5 Conditional effects for interaction between dimensions 1 and 2.

  9. Figure 6.6 MCA individuals plot for predictor ‘Political Affiliation’.

  10. Figure 6.7 MCA individuals plot for predictor ‘Party’.

  11. Figure 6.8 MCA individuals plot for predictor ‘Religion’.

  12. Figure 6.9 MCA individuals plot for predictor ‘Jacobite’.

  13. Figure 6.10 MCA individuals plot for predictor ‘Birthplace’.

  14. Figure 6.11 MCA individuals plot for predictor ‘Address’.

  15. Figure 6.12 MCA individuals plot for predictor ‘Relationship’.

  16. Figure 7.1 Proportions of Scots and anglicised variants across selected writers.

  17. Figure 7.2 Mosaic plot of Lockhart’s Scots and English frequencies by recipient.

  18. Figure 7.3 Mosaic plot of Mar’s Scots and English frequencies by recipient.

  19. Figure 7.4 Mosaic plot of Tweeddale’s Scots and English frequencies by recipient.

  20. Figure 7.5 Mosaic plot of Wodrow’s Scots and English frequencies by recipient.

  21. Figure A.1 Log odds of all effects in full brms model.

  22. Figure A.2 Posterior distributions and MCMC chains for final model.

Tables

  1. Table 4.1 Counts for number of writers across political factors.

  2. Table 4.2 The writers included in the corpus according to party or group.

  3. Table 4.3 Main extralinguistic factors.

  4. Table 4.4 Counts for POLITECS subcorpus used in these analyses.

  5. Table 4.5 Sample wordlist uploaded to LIWC manager.

  6. Table 4.6 Scots categories included in analysis, including example Scots spellings with their southern English equivalent.

  7. Table 5.1 Raw word counts and variant counts for year groups in POLITECS.

  8. Table 7.1 Letter, word and variable counts for Lockhart, Mar, Tweeddale and Wodrow.

Preface

This book is based on my PhD thesis, which explored the use of written Scots features in the personal correspondence of Scottish politicians active during the Union of the Parliaments debates. This period was an interesting and unique period of time to investigate, given that written Scots by 1700 had steadily retreated from most text-types in the face of ongoing anglicisation, but simultaneously the Union debates sparked heated discussion around questions of nationality and Scotland’s separate identity. It seemed plausible that Scots features may have been influenced by such discourse, and moreover could have become indexical markers used to lay claim to these ideologies, but previous research on this time period, particularly from a sociolinguistic perspective, was thin on the ground. I thus sought to don both my historical and sociolinguistic research caps, drawing from the frameworks of First, Second and Third Wave perspectives on variation, and combining quantitative, macro-social methods with micro-social analysis, to explore both broad sociopolitical factors alongside plausible stylistic intentions in conditioning or influencing the linguistic behaviour of these writers. After three years of navigating the archives, frustrating delays and dealing with the headaches of transcription and statistical analysis, it was to my great delight that results were obtained, and exciting results at that. Scots was found to correlate with certain political factors, though in complex and multilayered ways that reflect the composite nature of the historical figures operating in the Scottish parliament. The narrative presented here suggests use of Scots features was both influenced by, and contributed to, the political and ideological loyalties these writers harboured. It also tentatively suggests that a process of reinterpretation was underway, in which Scots features were becoming a resource that could be selectively employed for particular indexical and communicative purposes. It is my hope that the story presented here can be at once enlightening to the historical Scots community, and informative for historical sociolinguistic research in general, conveying the novelty and promise of this methodology and its results, and encouraging more scholars to seek out local archives to explore the treasure trove within.

Details

Pages
XX, 268
Publication Year
2025
ISBN (PDF)
9781803745022
ISBN (ePUB)
9781803745039
ISBN (Softcover)
9781803745015
DOI
10.3726/b21846
Language
English
Publication date
2026 (January)
Keywords
Germanic languages Romance languages Slavic languages standard languages standardisation historical sociolinguistics pluricentric languages pluriareal languages language teaching language norms codification norms of usage
Published
Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, 2025. xx, 268 pp., 20 fig. col., 2 fig. b/w, 12 tables.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Sarah van Eyndhoven (Author)

Sarah van Eyndhoven is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Canterbury. Her current research examines correspondence from early Scottish immigrants to New Zealand and the role of changing identities in Scots use. Her previous research has examined historical Scots in Older and early Modern periods using statistical methodologies.

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Title: «Ane end of an auld song?»