A Bright Future for Scottish Language Dictionaries
Scottish Language Dictionaries are to be directly funded by the Scottish Government. Linda Fabiani made the announcement at a conference in Stirling on Monday 9th February. This comes as a great relief to us, after a period of considerable uncertainty and we were delighted to hear Linda Fabiani say "Scots is a living language to be cherished and supported".
One of the highlights was a presentation given by some primary 7 children from St Ninians Primary School in Stirling. These pupils are members of the editorial committee creating a national children's dictionary from the many thousands of words the school collected in a "Word fae the Weans" project on 2002. SLD's Eileen Finlayson has created a database to handle this huge volume of data and SLD are acting as advisors and facilitators to the editorial committee consisting of current P7s and secondary school pupils who were involved in the initial stages of the project.
They are applying their growing expertise to a Homecoming project which will welcome Scots words home from overseas. There are many Scots words which have survived in communities where numbers of Scots emigrants have settled. If you want to send such a word home, please email homecomingwords@stirling.gov.uk.
Funding levels for SLD will build upon the support we have enjoyed from the Scottish Arts Council for several years. The increase in funding will allow us to employ additional members of staff, including a new lexicographer, a computational linguist, an outreach officer and administrative assistance. These new additions will allow us to expand and develop the work that we do as recorders of one of Scotland's national treasures, the Scots language.
