Sarah van Eyndhoven

This contribution explores transgenerational language change in a historical migrant community by qualitatively examining the correspondence of first- and second-generation Scottish immigrants coming to New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Taking a microsocial approach, the letters of a migrant family and one other migrant are explored for language maintenance and shift, to identify whether Scots language features were lost altogether or continued to be utilised for specific social, personal and stylistic goals, despite the English-dominant space that the migrants operated in. In tandem, the adoption of early New Zealand English (NZE) and te reo Māori lexis is analysed, to identify differences in usage patterns that might point to different degrees of integration and mobility. Finally, inter-writer and inter-generational differences are examined in relation to the mobility and social networks of the correspondents, to consider how this might contribute to any variation observed. For the investigation, manuscript letters were digitised, and relevant features identified, extracted and discursively analysed. Results show the continuation of heritage features through a combination of style-oriented goals and learned letter-writing practices, while the adoption of new lexis is shown to occur within specific semantic domains that reflect the social mobility of the migrants. However, language maintenance and shift are not uniform between the writers, elucidating the highly variable experiences of migrants, even within the same family. Rather, contact-induced language changes are sensitive to minute differences across individuals, underpinning the value of nuanced explorations of historical migration and language change.

A History of the Scots Language takes an ambitious and novel approach in examining the entire social and linguistic history of the Scots language, rather than choosing to focus on one side, as previous historical Scots publications have done. The result is a volume that brings together an incredible breadth of material from across the linguistic fields, incorporating an extensive historical timeline with purely linguistic developments and changes. As such, it forms an excellent starting point for scholars and students wishing to get a broad overview of the Scots language, its emergence and various stages of development, and the range of issues past and present that colour its character. Millar has chosen to keep the sociolinguistic strictly separate from the formal linguistic changes, and naturally some level of division is necessary to avoid complicating an already dense and complex discussion. However, the inevitable cross-over between the social and the linguistic means this strict separation does feel somewhat artificial, and occasionally the discussion lacks the supporting evidence or demonstrative power that a linguistic example or social explanation could bring to the conversation. Discussing morpho-syntactic changes that took place in Scots, for instance, would have benefitted from more consideration of why these changes took place when they did and how external factors such as the printing press or upper-class movements toward Anglicisation played a role. This would have enabled Millar's wealth of knowledge concerning the social history of Scots, clearly evident in the opening chapters, to feed back into the latter chapters and suggest the interaction between the first half of the book and the second, utilising the very value of this publication. The structuring of the book, however, is excellent-Millar provides a short introduction and conclusion to every chapter that succinctly sets the scene or sums up its contents, and uses these sections to draw continual links between the sociolinguistic and linguistic, helping to bridge the somewhat unnatural divide between the two sections. Alongside incorporating both social and linguistic developments in one place, A History of the Scots Language also 'attempts as deep a historical coverage as is possible' (p. ix). Whilst commendable, this runs the risk that the book strives to cover too much material within a limited scope. Some sections felt rather brief whilst the relevance of the material to the history of Scots, specifically, was missing in others. By trying to discuss everything at oncehistory, linguistics, literature, historical Scots,

It is currently unclear to what extent Older Scots features continued in correspondence during the early eighteenth century (Millar 2020: 100). To explore this, the digitised letters of politically-involved Scottish writers active during this time were compiled into a purpose-built corpus, and searched for the Scots feature . The focus was on three authors in particular who were selected for close-up analysis. Their correspondence was quantitatively analysed to determine the frequency of across author and word-type, which was then compared to the general dataset. Inter- and intra-writer variation was evaluated in relation to possible macrosocial influences. Results suggest that, contrary to earlier findings (Macqueen 1957; van Eyndhoven & Clark 2019), had not completely disappeared, but its persistence was largely conditioned by its use in abbreviations for highly frequent function words. The professional background of the author, however, is also shown to influence usage.

This study examines the effect of political change on the use of written Scots during the eighteenth century. In particular, it compares a cross-section of texts from literate Scottish society, with works from certain politically-active authors, who identified strongly as pro- or anti-Union following the creation of the British state in 1707. The proportion of Scots to English lexemes in their writing is explored using conditional inference trees and random forests, in a small, purpose-built corpus. Use of Scots is shown to differ between the two groups, with specific extralinguistic factors encouraging or suppressing the presence of written Scots. Frequency of Scots is also found to be influenced by the political ideology of the politicised authors. These results are linked to the Scottish political scene during the eighteenth century, as well as general processes of change over time.

This paper presents the new facilities provided in defoe, a parallel toolbox for querying a wealth of digitised newspapers and books at scale. defoe has been extended to work with further Natural Language Processing () tools such as the Edinburgh Geoparser, to store the preprocessed text in several storage facilities and to support different types of queries and analyses. We have also extended the collection of XML schemas supported by defoe, increasing the versatility of the tool for the analysis of digital historical textual data at scale. Finally, we have conducted several studies in which we worked with humanities and social science researchers who posed complex and interested questions to large-scale digital collections. Results shows that defoe allows researchers to conduct their studies and obtain results faster, while all the large-scale text mining complexity is automatically handled by defoe.