More Scots on Twitter

How Twitter is helping the Scots language thrive in the 21st century

Rude, crude and extremely funny, ” Scottish Twitter ” has garnered much attention in recent years for its uniquely Celtic wit – and for the specific ways it uses language. Journalist Eve Livingston’s recent article for The Face examines the many social and cultural features of Scottish Twitter.

Fascinating article on the use of Scots in social media. “Texts and Facebook messages are (or at least can be) private, informal forms of communication, and so we might expect more Scots to be used here. What Twitter gives us is a medium that sits somewhere between the private and the public. Research shows that people are more likely to write in a minority language such as Scots in posts directed at a specific user (semi-private) than they do in posts that are #hashtagged for a wider audience (public)”. The article concludes, “Scots on Twitter is a fascinating source of evidence about how aware people are of the subtle ways their speech differs from other people’s, and the creative ways they find to represent this”.

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