Mather, J. Y., and Speitel, H.-H. (eds.) 1975. The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland: Scots section, vol. 1. London: Croom Helm.
Mather, J. Y., and Speitel, H.-H. (eds.) 1977. The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland: Scots section, vol. 2. London: Croom Helm.

The Digital Lexical Atlas of Scotland is a collaborative project at the University of Vienna between a small team from within the SFB Deutsch in Österreich and John Kirk. The former has undertaken the digitization and online mapping processes; the latter, having secured permission for the digitization of the published atlas (Mather & Speitel 1975, 1977), has undertaken much of the analysis and interpretation of the data hitherto.

The data are representative of the traditional folk vocabulary of Scots, which ranges from words for human beings, their bodies, their clothes, their characteristics, to children’s games, the natural world, including insects, beasts and farm animals, and to the land and traditional (usually manual) ways of farming the land and animal husbandry – all referring to concepts which have been in oral currency for centuries.

After a brief introduction to the online atlas and its present scope, the paper will address a number of lexicological and semantic research questions pertaining to the data that have emerged during analysis, such as:

How Scottish are these Scots data?
What is the nature and function of the great many diminutives among the data?
Although onomasiological and pan-national in approach, how geolinguistic are the semasiological implications which arise?
How far do the data relate to cultural ethnography?