“Quhen I am begun to write I really knou not what to say”

Abstract

It is currently unclear to what extent Older Scots features continued in correspondence during the early eighteenth century (Millar 2020: 100). To explore this, the digitised letters of politically-involved Scottish writers active during this time were compiled into a purpose-built corpus, and searched for the Scots feature . The focus was on three authors in particular who were selected for close-up analysis. Their correspondence was quantitatively analysed to determine the frequency of across author and word-type, which was then compared to the general dataset. Inter- and intra-writer variation was evaluated in relation to possible macrosocial influences. Results suggest that, contrary to earlier findings (Macqueen 1957; van Eyndhoven & Clark 2019), had not completely disappeared, but its persistence was largely conditioned by its use in abbreviations for highly frequent function words. The professional background of the author, however, is also shown to influence usage.