Variation in bird names in Scots

This paper discusses the names for three birds in Scots, the traditional dialect of English in Scotland. The data were originally gathered for the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland and are now available in the Digital Lexical Atlas of Scotland for analysis and interpretation using corpus-linguistic techniques, of which a central principle is total accountability, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The paper’s focus is on contrastive lexical types, their lexicological status, their frequencies, their etymological origins, and their geographical spread, much of which required manual analysis and categorization. A concern is the Scottishness of those names, and what the names might reveal about the lexical nature and development of Scots. Each bird will be illustrated with one map.