The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs: Standardization and Lexical Bundles 1380-1560. Joanna Kopaczyk. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013. ISBN 9780199945153, 51 [pounds sterling], 368pp. The subject-matter of this book is so distinctive and unexpected as to arouse a potential reader's interest from the start: the language of the Scottish burgh records in the period from the first use of Scots as their medium to the Reformation. Yet the fact that this topic is unusual at once points to a glaring lacuna in the historical study of the Scots language. Poetry in Early and Middle Scots has, deservedly and most rewardingly, provided extensive material which has been the basis of many excellent studies: to this extent, pre-modern Scots has been fertile soil for historical linguists. With the development of corpus linguistics, other literary genres, notably correspondence, have been opened to fruitful investigations. But though the socio-historical and linguistic interest of prose texts, particularly utilitarian ones, may be great, it is not hard to understand that the works of Dunbar should be more enticing to many researchers than the Peebles burgh records of 1499; and the enormous field of Early and Middle Scots prose writing is still under-examined. And since the field of legal writings in particular has a linguistic dimension, given the long-standing tradition of Scots law and the distinctive lexical and stylistic features associated with it, some of which survive to the present day, the surprising thing is not that we now have a full-length monograph on the topic but that we have had to wait so long for one. This is particularly true in view of the fact, amply demonstrated in the preliminary chapters of the book, that legal language as a general subject has received extensive and detailed examination; much of which is summarily discussed in this section. The present study of the legal register of Middle Scots is thus an important contribution to a flourishing branch of linguistics. The author has an established reputation as a historical linguist, with several groundbreaking works on Scots already to her credit; and the range and depth of her reading on the topic is impressively shown here. An important distinction introduced in this section is that between language standardisation and linguistic standardisation, the former being the elevation of one particular dialect, because of extra-linguistic factors such as demographic strength or social prestige, to the status of a supra-regional norm; the latter, the settling of specific phonological, orthographic and grammatical features as the norms within a dialect. Examination of linguistic standardisation in Scots, the author points out, has always focused on the Anglicisation which took place in the post-Reformation period; the linguistic standardisation which was proceeding prior to this having so far received almost no attention. Having placed her study precisely in its academic context, Kopaczyk proceeds with a historical examination of the burghs and their place in Scottish history. As often, a widespread and long-term process common to all of northern Europe, in this case the evolution of areas where the population happened to be denser than in their hinterlands to legally-defined communities with formally established privileges and responsibilities binding on the community and its individual members, is shown to have taken a distinctive form in Scotland. …