My blogs cover three broad areas: contemporary British English, the languages of Scotland and the relationship between language and identity

The blogs are listed below with the most recent first; to read the blogs just click on the link

‘The time will not last for ever’: French as a world language (published 13 March 2025)

English as a European Lingua Franca: Will English Become a Mainland European Language? (published 15 February 2025)

The linguistic landscape of Dieppe (published 27 September 2024)

Not fit for purpose? The 2022 Scottish Census results on Gaelic and Scots (published 2 September 2024)

Language policy in Canada (published 6 August 2024)

What makes a world language?: an appreciation of Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word (published 25 May 2024)

The linguistic landscape of Portobello (published 3 October 2023)

Comparing texts using systemic functional grammar (published 29 August 2023)

The role of motivation in second language acquisition (published 29 August 2023)

Permissible word combinations in English (published 3 March 2023)

A corpus study of whether and how language use varies by social class (published 22 July 2022)

Using a corpus to investigate grammar mistakes (published 26 June 2022)

Is Scots a language or a dialect? (published 6 January 2022)

A history of Scots since 1603 (published 14 October 2021)

Three Stormzy songs (published 4 August 2021)

A second test of Grammarly (published 4 July 2021)

A critical discourse analysis of the representations in Scottish newspapers of the case for a second independence referendum (published 30 June 2021)

A history of Scots up to 1603 (published 23 March 2021)

What will be the role of English within the EU after Brexit? (published 18 February 2021)

The slow death of Scottish Gaelic - is there a future? (published 21 December 2020)

How good is Grammarly in identifying grammar mistakes? (published 2 December 2020)

The Eurovision Song Contest and English as a lingua franca (published 5 November 2020)

The slow death of Scottish Gaelic - past and present (published 13 October 2020)

The language of covid (published 14 September 2020)

Blog topics (published 23 August 2020)