Six months after St. Andrew’s Day I finally received my entire order from Edinburgh University Press. The university advertised a sale at the end of November last year, yet it has taken me six months for the third and final book of my order to come in. The first two books, below, arrived in December. After months of E-mail exchanges and two mistakenly cancelled reorders, I finally got the long-delayed third book yesterday. Here’s what I ordered:
A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland by Robert McColl Millar examines how language has been used in Scotland since the earliest times. The primary focus of the book is Scots and Gaelic, yet also traces the decline and death of Pictish, British and Norn. There are also four case studies illustrating the historical development of North East Scots, Scottish Standard English, Shetland Scots and Glasgow Scots.
New Gaelic Speakers in Nova Scotia and Scotland: Heritage, Motivation and Identity by Stuart S. Dunmore explores the similarities and differences between the revitalization efforts of Gaelic in two faraway communities.
The book that took six months to arrive: New Zealand English by Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan and Elizabeth Gordon. New Zealand English is one of the youngest native speaker varieties of English, and it is the only variety where there is recorded evidence of its entire history. There are Maori loanwords in NZ English, as well as influences from the Australian and South African idioms. I am interested in the chapter called Variation within New Zealand, especially to see if there are differences in the language spoken on North and South Island.