About the Author

Robert McColl Millar is Professor in Linguistics and Scottish Language at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Born in 1966 in Elderslie, Renfrewshire (the birthplace of William Wallace of Braveheart fame), he attended the University of Glasgow and King's College London, achieving a doctorate in English Historical Linguistics from the latter in 1991. After holding academic posts in Canada, Finland, Austria and Norway, he came to Aberdeen in 1996. He has published widely in the fields of historical sociolinguistics and sociology of language, with particular – but not exclusive – reference to English and Scots; he is the author of seven books, including System Collapse, System Rebirth: The Demonstrative Systems of English 900–1350 and the Birth of the Definite Article (2000), Language, Nation and Power (2005), Northern and Insular Scots (2007), Authority and Identity: A Sociolinguistic History of Europe before the Modern Age (2010), English Historical Sociolinguistics (2012) and Lexical Variation and Attrition in the Scottish Fishing Communities (with William Barras and Lisa Marie Bonnici; 2014). He is Chair of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster, and editor of Scottish Language. Robert is married to Sandra, who is originally from Luxembourg. They have one daughter, Mairi, who was born in 2008.

 

Larry Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and a world authority on Basque language and historical linguistics. He achieved degrees in Chemistry at Rensselaer College and Brandeis University in the USA, before moving to the United Kingdom where he received his doctorate in Linguistics from the University of London. His other publications with Routledge include The History of Basque (2014), Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts (2007), and Language: The Basics (1999) among many others.