James Boswell (1740-1795) and his Design for A Dictionary of the Scot[t]ish Language, 1764-1825

James Boswell (1740-1795), friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson, strove to emulate Johnson, who had in 1755 produced the most famous dictionary of English to date, by beginning his own dictionary, of the Scottish language, in 1764. A draft of Boswell's Dictionary of Scots has just been announced as rediscovered, but up to now we have also had Boswell's sketches for the work. They explain in great detail his motives and goals in the uncompleted magnum opus. Most contemporary word-lists of Scots were aimed at helping Scots to avoid making mistakes in speaking and writing English in order to help them assimilate and get along in London, or they were used as glossaries to poems to help readers of those specific texts. By contrast, Boswell's dictionary was to be aimed at the preservation, for scholars rather than vernacular speakers, of a once-dominant elite and courtly language, which was now diminishing, and thought by many, including Johnson, to be on its way to extinction. Boswell's comments on the Dictionary reveal much about Enlightenment views on vanishing indigenous societies and the impact of metropolitanization in the British Empire and other empires. The article contributes to a growing body of work suggesting that the so-called "Anglo-Scots" or "North Britons" (including Boswell) had much more interest in Scottish national identity and national language than had previously been assumed.