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Part of
English Historical Linguistics: Historical English in contact
Edited by Bettelou Los, Chris Cummins, Lisa Gotthard, Alpo Honkapohja and Benjamin Molineaux
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 359] 2022
► pp. 75–96

Chapter 5
Old Northumbrian in the Scottish Borders

Evidence from place-names

ORCID logo | University of Glasgow
Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland: Evidence from place-names (REELS) is a research project funded for three years by The Leverhulme Trust at the University of Glasgow: http://​berwickshire​-placenames​.glasgow​.ac​.uk/. The project team is using a place-name survey of the historical county of Berwickshire in the Scottish Borders, the heartland of Anglo-Saxon settlement in Scotland from the seventh to eleventh centuries, to investigate the Northumbrian dialect of Old English and its development into Older Scots. The place-name data are being analysed for evidence of the lexis, semantics, morphology and phonology of Old Northumbrian, a language variety poorly attested in other (written and epigraphic) sources. This chapter presents some discoveries from the ongoing project, alongside a discussion of the strengths and limitations of place-name evidence in this context.
Keywords: Berwickshire, Old English, Old Northumbrian, Older Scots, place-names, Scottish Borders
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Dictionary evidence and place-name evidence
  • 3.Morphological evidence
  • 4.Phonological evidence
  • 5.Lexical evidence
  • 6.Semantic evidence
  • 7.Further information
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 2 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.359.05hou
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OEC = Old English Corpus: [URL]
OED = Oxford English dictionary: [URL]. Where comparison is made between the second edition and the ongoing third edition, these are identified respectively as OED2 and OED3. Otherwise, all references are to the latest revision available in May 2019.
REELS = Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland: evidence from place-names: [URL]
VEPN = Parsons, David N. et al. 1997–. The vocabulary of English place-names. 3 volumes so far published. Nottingham: Centre for English Name Studies.Google Scholar
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