The SCOTS Project
Shetlopedia - The Shetland Encyclopaedia that anyone can edit
The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) project is based in the Department of English Language at the University of Glasgow. The aim of the project is to build a collection or 'corpus' of written and spoken texts in the languages of Scotland for linguistic and cultural research.
At present the collection includes texts in Scottish English and varieties of Scots, including insular Scots from Shetland and Orkney. A search for texts whose authors/participants were either born in or now live in Shetland produces (at the time of writing) 44 results, ranging from interviews to prose fiction and poetry, and even email correspondence. Spoken texts are available as transcriptions alongside audio files (playable with Apple Quicktime). We have recently added a map function which allows the user to see the texts from a particular geographical area.
Example of interview with a teacher from Shetland
Example of prose in Shetlandic
The corpus is regularly updated and can be freely browsed and searched online at Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech .
Offers of texts are very welcome, and we are keen to increase the quantity and breadth of texts from Shetland in the SCOTS corpus - please contact us through the website or by email to scots@arts.gla.ac.uk.
