Introduction

The early history of some geographical varieties of English is in the process of being rewritten as a result of there now being a much wider range of texts available for tracing diachronic developments in greater detail than before. As compared with research based on the literary canon, studies extracting data from non-literary genres such as legal documents, handbooks, scientific treatises, narratives of a more private or informal nature, for instance diaries and autobiographies, and official and private letters, have provided evidence of a lower degree of uniformity and unidirectionality in patterns reflecting variation and change; in fact a high degree of heterogeneity and quite complex processes of change have also emerged in regional and local varieties used in relatively restricted areas. This is of course what compilers of diachronic computer-readable corpora have had as their working hypothesis. Moreover, with the new generation of carefully structured diachronic corpora (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.) 1996, Meurman-Solin forthcoming b, c), the application of some of the methods of modern sociolinguistics to diachronic data now seems possible and reasonable.

The case of the Scottish English variety is particularly interesting because of the varying social, cultural and political pressures created on the one hand by the local and regional interests, and on the other hand by England, and also by the two nations' somewhat different contacts with the Continent.