This is the first textbook accessible to students for use in university courses since Grant & Dixon (1921) - in contrast to the many introductions available for the history of British and American English. The description deals with the status and forms of Scots, its incipient standardization and the dialectalization followed by its development 1400-2000 on the levels of spelling, phonology, inflection, syntax and lexis. Special chapters are devoted to Literary Scots and the consequences of the anglization and the reduction of Scots to a restricted range of functions. The description is accompanied by a great number of illustrations and textual excerpts as well as questions which lead the student on to the 75 longer texts selected from six centuries and from various genres.