Johann W. Unger's The discursive construction of the Scots language aims to expand the range of applications for discourse analysis by using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to look at the interaction between language policy and national identity when discussing the minority language Scots. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the text and an overview of the content of the seven chapters. The chapter is also used to distinguish ambiguous but important terms such as Scots referring to the language and Scottish relating to the country and people of Scotland. Chapter 2 provides a brief sociolinguistic overview of the historical development of Scots, separating it from English and Scottish Gaelic, and expands on previous scholarly research surrounding Scots.

Unger introduces the theoretical and methodological foundations of his research in chapter 3 and evaluates their efficiency and relevancy in his work. A brief history and overview of the theoretical assumptions of CDA, definitions of salient terms, and justification of text and focus group choices are also presented in this chapter. Chapter 4 provides an analysis of four top-down written texts pertaining to Scottish governmental and educative language policies, and chapter 5 reports on Unger's findings from the focus group debates. The top-down texts present three overlapping fields of construction—political, bureaucratic, and educational. They indicate an approval of Scots by elite respondents in certain contexts. Chapter 5 presents complementary data from two focus groups discussing language use in Scotland. Unger used texts, grammar exercises, and Scottish parliamentary debates to prompt discussion about attitudes towards Scots and its appropriateness in different domains. The participants in the focus groups juxtapose Scots with the perceived standard of English, and an indicated parallel with the situation of Welsh in Wales demonstrating the importance of a cultural language. Unger concludes that the focus groups show the same ambivalence in discursive strategies of Scots that can be observed in the top-down texts.

Chapter 6 considers recent political and educational texts pertaining to Scots, highlighting changing attitudes and potential future developments of the language's use in society. Unger notes that a survey on Scots shows that there is an inverse correlation between a participant's frequency of Scots usage and their tendency to consider Scots a language, rather than a way of speaking. This chapter indicates that Scots has recently become part of the political agenda in Scotland but there is still a lack of public exposure that creates difficulty in defining the language.

The final chapter provides a summary of Unger's findings including the three macro-strategies for constructing Scots: as a language/dialect/accent, as a child's language variety, and as a heritage variety of cultural importance. Unger indicates that a vague, underspecified definition of Scots still exists in texts from the political and educational fields and this creates some challenges to its discursive construction. Unger concludes that for the discursive construction of Scots how things are said in the various texts is equally as important as what is being said.