James Kelman is a prize-winning writer of fiction in various genres who was born in 1946. This chapter takes Kelman's lead on that declaration of his evident literary priorities: language and place. The non-'standard’ appearance of Kelman's prose is often categorized by commentators as ‘dialect’. In an article in the Guardian in 2014, titled ‘A Difficulty with Dialect’ the writer asserts that Kelman is ‘dialect heavy’ (Taylor), while on the Scottish Language Centre website Kelman is claimed with pride as a writer in Scottish and Glaswegian dialect. A real examination of the prose, however, in terms of vocabulary used and orthography, will reveal to any knowledgeable reader that Kelman's prose is very rarely a straightforward attempt to reproduce the Scottish or Glaswegian dialect.