Lexical Variation and Attrition in the Scottish Fishing Communities

Robert McColl Millar is Reader in Linguistics in the School of Language & Literature at the University of Aberdeen. His books include Northern and Insular Scots (2007), Authority and Identity. A Sociolinguistic History of Europe before the Modern Age (2010) and English Historical Sociolinguistics (2012). William Barras is a Lecturer in Language and Linguistics at the University of Aberdeen. He has research interests in phonetics and phonology, sociolinguistics, dialectology, and the ways in which language is used to shape identity. He has conducted linguistic fieldwork on these topics in East Lancashire, on the Scottish-English border and in Edinburgh, as well as in the coastal fishing communities as part of the Fisher Speak project from which this book developed. Lisa Marie Bonnici received her PhD in Linguistics from UC Davis in 2010. Following this, she carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Aberdeen for the FisherSpeak project. Her research focuses on sociolinguistic variation and change and language ideologies in emerging varieties of English. She currently directs an international program at a college preparatory school in Southern California, where she lives with her son, Oliver, and husband, Richard.

• 1. Language Attrition and Lexical Variation and Change; 2. The history and culture of the Scottish fishing communities; 3. Methodology; 4. Analysis of the data; 5. Conclusions; Footnotes; References.