| A new online Dictionary of the Scots Language, developed by faculty members of the university, was officially launched by Geoffery Cossick, head of the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB).
Described as the most accessible Scots language resource around, the developers — English lecturer Victor Skretkowicz and lexicographer Susan Rennie — hope it will revive interest in the Scots brogue.
Already, students, scholars and ex-pat Scots spread across the globe are using the dictionary.
As well as words and phrases, it contains parts of speeches from the closing session of the Scottish Parliament as it was dissolved and amalgamated to create the UK Parliament in 1707,and words spoken at the Declaration of Arbroath, when Robert the Bruce declared independence from England in 1306.
The developers have spent three years and £320,000 on the project and made use of 22 volumes of Scots dictionaries to bring it up-to-date.
“For nearly a century, successive editors of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and The Scottish National Dictionary laboured to create a historical and cultural record of Scots, from 1200 to 1976,” said Mr Skretkowicz.
“But now, through ‘virtual integration’, the Dictionary of the Scots Language brings their linguistic, historical and cultural records together and facilitates rapid researching of their contents.”
Chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary John Simpson welcomed the new resource. “The University of Dundee and the AHRB are to be congratulated,” he said.
The dictionary can be accessed free at www.dsl.ac.uk. |
