20.8 Course conclusion

You have now reached the end of this course on Scots language and culture. We would like to thank you for participating in this course, where you engaged with a wide variety of artefacts in the Scots language – ranging from Medieval wills and translations of the Bible, to films and radio shows, poems, songs, cooking recipes and tweets in Scots.

We hope that you have found this course thought-provoking and that you have learned new Scots words and phrases, as well as a lot of new things about Scotland, its diverse regions, and its rich culture and history – even if you have lived in Scotland all your life.

If you were not a speaker of Scots when embarking on your study, we hope that you now feel you can understand the language when hearing and reading it, have a good grasp of Scots grammar, of the differences between Scots and English, and have even begun to speak and write in Scots yourself.

We thank our partner institution, Education Scotland, and Bruce Eunson in particular, for their outstanding collaboration on this project, without which this course would not have come to fruition.

Secondly, we express our gratitude to the authors (listed here in alphabetical order) for their rich contributions and excellent co-operation with us on this resource:

• Alan Riach
• Annie Mattheson
• Ashely Douglas
• Billy Kay
• Bruce Eunson
• Chris Robinson
• Diane Anderson
• Donald Smith
• Ged O’Brien
• Ian Brown
• James Robertson
• Liz Niven
• Matthew Fitt
• Michael Dempster
• Simon Hall
• Steve Byrne

Without their expertise, knowledge and experience this course could not have become the wide-ranging resource it is, including the images and audio recordings many of the authors contributed.

We would also like to express our thanks to Laura Green, Michael Hance, Alistair Heather, Christine De Luca and Jeremy Smith for volunteering to record audio for this course, a resource that adds much to its language learning aspect. In addition, we would like to thank our course pilot participants for their invaluable feedback.

Finally, we would like to thank Sylvia Warnecke for all her inspiring work on the development of the educational course design for teaching Scots on the course, as well as authoring the Introductions to parts 1 and 2 and many of the activities on the course.