There are two issues in Scots spelling, how different it should be from English and which dialectical variant should be chosen. Neither has reached a satisfactory conclusion yet with the result that every writer uses his or her own written 'idiolect'. Nevertheless all is not total anarchy. The Concise English-Scots Dictionary (CESD) which came out in 1993 is the 'bible' for vocabulary, but it often gives alternative spellings and itself has chosen a particular system. The Scots School Dictionary was based on this work. The one thing everyone agrees on is that apostrophies (the Curse of Burns) should be avoided at all costs (ie o', a' , o'er etc).

The argument is between those who want to make Scots more distinct from English and those who want to keep it fairly similar. To the 'radicals', orthography should reflect the fact that Scots has different historic and linguistic roots and should also attempt to achieve a more phonetic transliteration. The 'traditionalists' argue that many Scots words now have established spellings (based on the English spelling system) which are widely recognisable to the learner and moreover English spelling rules are very familiar. Take the example of the English word 'house'. Clearly it has a different pronunctiation in Scots, normally represented as 'hoose'. However, the radicals argue that 'oo' is an English import; 'ou' in Scots is always pronounced 'oo', and the 'e' is redundant anyway so the spelling should be should be 'hous' or 'houss'. Radicals go further by setting Scots phonetic spelling rules such as 'ei' for any occurance of the sound represented by 'ee', 'ei', 'ie' etc in English and arguing that any borrowed or shared 'English' words should conform to these rules. Thus we have doar, aixerceize, streit, leit etc.

Despite the above, most Scots words have an uncontroversial spelling and the CESD is an excellent guide: agley, blate, burn, dreich, ettle, gallus, girn, kenspeckle, morn, nyaff, renaig, sark, speir, swither etc etc. On the other hand a few vowels have distinct local sounds. Is it 'aa' or 'aw' (all) , 'pairk' or 'perk' (park)? It depends where you come from. The way CESD hints is to pick a version eg 'puir' and accept that people will pronounce it in different ways. Most written languages work in this way, there's no reason for Scots to be different.

The new School Scots Dictionary (SSD), produced in April 1996 by the Scots National Dictionary Association made an important step in going beyond a descriptive lexicon to a prescriptive list of words, targeted at schools where the future speakers and writers of Scots will be found. However, the list has not had universal acceptance so far, and indeed it seems, inconsistent and idiosyncratic in parts. Over the summer, the Scots Language Society have been canvassing members to see where SSD may be improved. Nevertheless it is likely to form the main component of Scots for the near future and over 90% of this site conforms to the SSD lexicon and othography.