The Orkney and Shetland dialect corpus scoping study will prepare for a research study on Orkney and Shetland dialect grammar. The research project would shed light on the grammar of two dialects which are the products of a language contact situation. For four hundred years or more, a dialect of Old Norse was in contact with dialects of Scots in the Northern Isles. During this period (15th - 19th century) Scots gained currency as the language of Orkney and Shetland, while the local dialect of Old Norse gradually went out of use. Sometime during this period, local dialects of Scots formed in Orkney and Shetland, incorporating words and structures from the Old Norse dialect. The research project which the scoping study is preparing for, aims to develop a database (corpus) of naturally occurring dialect texts from Orkney and Shetland, which would be digitally searchable. This corpus would then be available for researchers to use as data material for investigating the linguistic structures of the Orkney and Shetland dialects. Grammatical investigation of the Orkney and Shetland dialects would then hopefully enable us, in the next instance, to shed light on the language contact and shift and answer such questions as: When did the Scots dialects of Orkney and Shetland consolidate - based on the presence of relict forms from older stages of Scots? Can we trace any Old Norse or Middle Norwegian influence on the grammar of the Orkney and Shetland Scots dialects? Can we find grammatical structures in the Orkney and Shetland dialects which have developed independently of Scots and the local Old Norse dialect?