Scots and its local varieties: A linguistic investigation of a selection of contemporary literary texts

My dissertation explores how the Scots language by its speakers as a tool to express their identity in some contexts of the Scottish society, is used. Using a small corpus of three books written by Scottish writers partially in English and partially in Scots, I focus on some grammatical and pragmatic aspects, namely the use of vocabulary, pronouns, interjections, the Northern Subject Rule, and negation in the Scots language. Then I draw a comparison of how Scots and English are used in the literary works of the corpus. From the analyses conducted, I argue that the use of Scots helps its speakers to better convey their intended meanings and by doing that also their own identity. From a comparison with English, it has emerged that Scots still carries a stigma for some of its speakers, who see it as a carrier of an identity from which they want to disassociate.