This book undertakes an investigation of Old Norse loanwords found in Scots (Scottish dialects of English, as opposed to [Celtic] Scots Gaelic), presumably the result of a period of language contact beginning in the Middle Ages. K divides the present study into two major portions, the socio-historical and theoretical background (chapters 1–3) and the loanword data, divided by semantic categories of K's devising (chapters 4–15). Chapter 16 concludes the text with an evaluation of the Scandinavian influence on the Scottish lexicon of the early and middle periods. Also included are a Middle Scottish word index and an extended appendix comparing first corpus attestation for the Scandinavian words presented in Scots and non-Scottish English.

In order to claim language contact of the sort K proposes, it is necessary to establish that the populations in question indeed were in geographical proximity during the period in question, and, to the degree possible, to ascertain the regularity and intimacy of the contact between the speech communities, such that borrowing, if not incipient bilingualism, existed. Chapter 1 summarizes what is known, and in some cases presumed, given that direct evidence of life in Scotland in the Middle Ages is rare. For example, documentary evidence includes annals and epic poetry, neither of which is fully reliable in terms of objectivity of reporting (compare, for example, Loyn 1994 for a chronology of evidence for Scandinavian settlement patterns in Britain). One of K's explicit goals for this work (p. 10) is an extension of Ritchie's (1993) research on the Viking time in Scotland through the inclusion of specifically linguistic data. This goal is met admirably.

K proceeds by region within Scotland and describes systematically what is available in terms of evidence for Scottish-Scandinavian contact conditions. Since not all regions of Scotland are equally relevant for the study of Scandinavian-Scots contact, K focuses on a subset of regions.

Chapter 2 motivates and explains the terms “Old Scots” and “Middle Scots,” with reference to documents and authors, as well as the development of Scots as a language of social prestige in the region, as distinct from Anglo-Saxon in particular. With the development of Scots as an autonomous language (variety), the study of Scots-Scandinavian contact finds full motivation, separate from a more general and less nuanced study of Scandinavian-English contact. An important and well-used reference on the development of Scots is the Jones (1997) edited volume. K's Scots corpus owes much to the literary record, and regional dialectological factors are filtered through the presumed regional origins of the primary authors. The corpus includes both a catalog of literary works and Scots reference dictionaries, most prominently the Dictionary of the Scots Tongue (DOST, Craigie et al. 1937–2002). This dictionary is explicitly limited to the period from the 12th century to the end of 17th.

Chapter 3 seeks to contextualize some general points concerning contact-linguistic theory. K briefly but effectively points out patterns of adaptation of Scandinavian phonemes in Scots, with examples of words in the source language (Old Norse) and corresponding items in the recipient language (Scots). Also addressed in the context of borrowing are morphological adaptation and two semantic dimensions, usefulness and reanalysis. In this way, K demonstrates that the situation she describes is fully compatible with general contact theory, and thus implies that any conclusions drawn here are generalizable to cases wherever contact conditions were reasonably similar.

Lexical transfer is assumed by default to result from borrowing by speakers of the recipient language, but there are cases, in communities that shift from one language to another, of lexical transfer brought about by the agency of the shifting population; that is, by the speakers of the source language (imposition, in the terminology of Van Coetsem 1988), rather than by borrowing as commonly understood. Thus lexical transfer is a more neutral term. K notes that in the Scandinavian-Scots case, the two types of agentivity are weakly demarcated (p. 83, but see Stewart in press for evidence of both types of agentivity in Scots Gaelic-Scandinavian lexical transfer).

Chapters 4 through 15 present borrowed words within semantic categories. K has chosen the following semantic categories (aside from “Abstrakta,” the categories are ordered alphabetically):

There are, however, a number of other possible organizing principles for such a list. For example, one might use a theoretically based list, ordering categories with respect to the amount of intimate contact or bilingualism that would be implied by borrowing in that semantic domain. One might also order the categories simply by either the number of lexemes or potentially the token-frequency of the categories’ members in the corpus.

My only quibble with K's categorization is the inclusion of grammatical/function words together with the “Alltag” category. In one sense, grammatical formatives are likely to be token-frequent, and therefore relatively “everyday” words. From the point of view of “borrowability” on the one hand, and of integration into constructions or morphosyntactic frames on the other, there is perhaps a qualitative distinction to be drawn between lexemes related to everyday life and grammatical words that gain common use due to their place with respect to the overall structure of the grammar of Scots (and not coincidentally of the grammar of the Old Norse source language), and not due to their semantic relevance. K keeps the two types of words separate within chapter 4, but there might be motivation for a full chapter distinction, since there is a considerable literature on the greater borrowability of content, as opposed to function, words (Thomason and Kaufman 1988:74–83).

K explicitly foregrounds several general methodological issues for research of this nature (as on p. 73). For example, using a dictionary/corpus that is compiled from written sources, rather than from fieldwork among living contemporary speakers, necessarily incorporates both positive and negative accidents of attestation. Firstly, how widespread a particular attested word may have been at any particular time in the past may be difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain, especially at a remove of a century or more. K notes the problem of including literature in translation (for example, Douglas's Scots translation of Virgil's Aeneid) in adding “phantom words” to the corpus. Secondly, many existing words may simply not be attested within the corpus in question, resulting in their accidental omission from the corpus. I am, however, not aware of any way proactively to eliminate false positives and negatives from consideration. “Ghosts” of both sorts are generally assumed to be a small minority, and therefore may safely be ignored in statistical surveys, for example, relating to a particular corpus. K hopes that even if the corpus cannot be said to correspond to the vocabulary of a single Scots speaker, it may be representative of the collective vocabulary.

Another of K's goals for this work is to provide a basis for further research, especially in phonology and morphology. K rightly points out that although date of transfer is difficult to ascertain, first corpus attestation and participation in particular sound changes in Scots provide a fairly reliable terminus ante quem for lexical transfer. The data provided here offer insight not only into loan phonology and adaptation, but also into internal phonological change in Scots.

K has compiled and contextualized a valuable resource on Scandinavian-Scots contact and lexical transfer that is of interest to historians, philologists, dialectologists, linguistic anthropologists, and contact-linguistic scholars, among others. Assumptions and methodology are clearly laid out from the outset, and the argumentation is clear and readily understandable to the lay reader as well as the specialist.