Abstract
Scottish Standard English (SSE) is often regarded as a standard Scottish English accent combined with a standard grammar shared with the rest of Britain. In consequence, SSE is underexplored (except, perhaps, for its phonology) and has virtually no place in the research field of World Englishes. We argue that this is because linguists studying grammatical variation concentrate on Scots, rather than SSE. In the second part of the chapter, the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Scotland) is presented as a tool that can remedy this situation. Its text categories cover domains of usage ranging from the standard pole to the interface of standard and non-standard, and their exploration will contribute to a better definition of SSE and its boundaries on all linguistic levels, at the same time enabling comparisons with other standard varieties of English.