Linda Bruce

My doctoral project examines linguistic diversity in Scotland by investigating Scots new speakers’ identities, language practices, attitudes and motivations. Scots is spoken by around 1.5 million people in Scotland and is afforded protection under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML). Nevertheless, the provision of facilities enabling non-speakers of Scots to learn it has been recently evaluated as ‘poor’. My work aims to seek out, research, and offer opportunities for adult new speakers of Scots to voice their experiences and needs; and to build a corpus of Scots new speakers’ language to allow me to investigate whether these individuals contribute to, or drive, sociolinguistic variation and change in contemporary Scots. In 2020, I completed my MSc in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, with a dissertation examining Scottish lexis and syntax use among Scottish tour guides. My PhD project is supervised by Dr Sylvia Warnecke, Dr Laura Paterson and Professor Rosina Marquez-Reiter at the Open University.