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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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