This series captures presentations from the 2024 Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster conference. Researchers from universities across the UK, Ireland and Switzerland examine the Scots language from multiple angles – historical, sociolinguistic and educational.

Topics span the Great Vowel Shift’s impact on Older Scots, religious texts from the Reformation period, census data revealing Scots’ contemporary status, and debates over whether Scots qualifies as a language. Other episodes explore variation in spoken language across the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland; the role of ‘new speakers’ in language revitalisation; Scots and Gaelic in radical 20th‑century magazines; and comparative analysis of Scots with Swiss German in classroom settings. The conference brings together linguistics specialists to analyse how this distinctive tongue survives, adapts and is taught in the twenty‑first century.