Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster

The 13th international conference of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster (FRLSU) will be run as an online event hosted at LMU Munich from 28 to 30 October 2021.

This year, the FRLSU conference will move outside of the UK for the first time in its history. In these politically challenging times, we want to highlight the international interest in the study of the languages of Scotland and Ulster. We hope to break down the newly reinforced borders and advocate increasing international cooperation in academia.

With much research done in the UK, there is also a long tradition of research on the languages of Scotland and Ulster, including their varieties spoken around the globe, by scholars from all over the world. This tradition reaches back to earlier research in traditional dialectology, such as the descriptions of Scottish regional dialects in the early 20th century by the Swiss dialectologists Eugen Dieth and Rudolph Zai. In the later 20th and 21st centuries, international researchers continued to contribute to the spread of new methods and paradigms in the study of the languages of Scotland. Recent decades have, for instance, seen the compilation of the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (HCOS) and the Helsinki Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (ScotsCorr) in Finland, the compilation of ICE Scotland in Germany, as well as the application of new approaches, e.g., in sociolinguistics or in historical pragmatics, by linguists from across Europe. In addition to the substantial research output by scholars from outside of Scotland, there has been growing research interest in varieties of Scots and Gaelic around the world, e.g., Scots in North America and Australia or Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia, Canada.

By placing a thematic focus on the languages of Scotland and Ulster in a global context, both in the past and today, we intend to showcase the international research on the languages of Scotland and Ulster and hope to inspire future (international) projects. We are happy to welcome Marina Dossena of the University of Bergamo, Rob Dunbar of the University of Edinburgh and Ole Schützler of the University of Leipzig as plenary speakers.

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