'This book is a really important and exciting contribution not only to the history of Scots spelling - where its discussion may be regarded as authoritative - but also to more general approaches to the history of orthography, drawing upon major large electronic corpora in an exciting and really novel way.' Jeremy Smith, University of Glasgow 'This book makes an original and distinctive contribution to scholarship in a number of areas as well as containing material that will be of interest to any well-informed reader, providing an important addition to the relatively small field of the history of Scots orthography.' Joan Beal, University of Sheffield People have been writing in Scots for over 700 years, but the spelling of Scots has never been fixed, with many words, like buik, buke, book, appearing in a variety of forms. Drawing on the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, this volume provides a comprehensive account of the spelling system of Older and Modern Scots, illustrating how this orthographic system has developed partly in response to historical shifts in pronunciation, and partly as a result of social and political change. Spelling Scots: The Orthography of Literary Scots, 1700-2000 acts not only as a wide-ranging reference book to the changing orthography of Scots, but also as an outline of the active interventions in the practices that have guided Scots spelling. The book shows how canonical writers of poetry and fiction in Scots from 1700 to the present day have blended convention and innovation in presenting Scots in literary texts, and it explores the influence of key writers such as Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns, Scott, Hogg and Stevenson. Introducing an innovative method of tracing the use of key spelling variants in a corpus of Scots writing, the book discusses the implication of this method for promoting wider literacy in Scots. Jennifer Bann worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow, on the AHRC-funded Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing and Correspondence of Dr William Cullen projects. John Corbett is Professor of English at the University of Macau and a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Glasgow. Cover image: Illustration by Cam Kennedy from Kidnappit, published by Itchy Coo, 2007 Cover design: Stuart Dalziel [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com ISBN 978-0-7486-4305-9 Barcode lish at the University of Macau and a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Glasgow.