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Abstract
What I would like to share with you is one of the most intractable and frustrating problems in the study of traditional dialects. It is the problem of currency. Does anybody out there still use the words and phrases that we document in the dialect dictionaries? This is a problem that is of great concern at the moment to the Scottish National Dictionary Association, and it will inevitably become an issue for the Ulster Dictionary Project, if this continues in existence beyond the present pocket dictionary.
In The Scottish National Dictionary the dictionary entries contain statements about geographical currency, and also cautious indications when a word is thought to be obsolete or obsolescent. These judgements are based partly on the spread of literary citations, but there was also a system of checking each fascicle in draft form by sending it out to subscribers and other contacts around the country. These currency statements are simply repeated, in summarized form, in The Concise Scots Dictionary (1985) and these are in turn inherited by The Scots Thesaurus (1990).