As canny scrievers mebbe ken a'ready, this is the season for the annual James McCash Scots Poetry Competition. As always, there are covetable prizes with a total value of £1500 to be won in the competition, which is run jointly by The Herald and Glasgow University. The first prize is £750; the second, £350; and the third, £200. In addition, the best entrant aged 17 or under will receive £200.

In previous years, hundreds of entries have come from abroad, from as far afield as Alaska and the Caribbean, California and Hong Kong, Finland, France, Spain and Malta. We hope that the worldwide Scottish diaspora will be very much to the fore again this year.

This is the fifth year of the pleasant collaboration between the newspaper and university. It is also, of course, the landmark year that has seen the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Union and the installation of a Scottish Nationalist administration at Holyrood. Reflecting these events, a theme has been set. It is the celebrated quote from Sir Walter Scott: "This is my own, my native land."

Now seems an appropriate time to challenge Scots to explore their attitudes towards their country and its distinctive heritage (without, it is to be hoped, indulging in jingoism or anti-English rhetoric). It's appropriate, too, that they should employ their own traditional language with its pithy, original vocabulary and idioms. Think of wonderful meaty words such as glaikit, gallus, scunnered, beelin, peelie-wally, for which there are no adequate English equivalents.

The McCash Prize is intended to celebrate and encourage this rich linguistic inheritance. Happily, the language has retained its vitality and relevance in daily life north of the Border, in spite of past educational efforts to discourage it and in spite, also, of the insidiously homogenising effects of mass media.

There is a symmetry about the theme for this year's McCash competition. James McCash, a Glasgow University engineering graduate, won the first prize in a 1970s Herald poetry competition on this very theme. Though no particular language was stipulated, his entry, recalling his childhood days on a farm, was written in Dunbar-style classic Scots.

The competition was sponsored by an international whisky firm. The Herald representative among the judges should have been the paper's London editor, a scholarly man whose surname happened to be that of a rival whisky giant.

The prizewinners have been an unpredictable lot, ranging from lecturers and teachers and a sprightly 73-year-old woman from Lenzie embarking on a PhD, to a North Sea oil worker and a former mining engineer turned psychiatric nurse. Our junior winners have included a young Aberdonian who was the first boy in his school to go to Oxford University.

Subjects, too, have ranged from the comic to the serious, such as the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the current Iraq engagement. Even in 2005, when the theme of "heroes" was set to mark the 700th anniversary of William Wallace's death, entries managed to encompass not just the martyred patriot but a host of others, from football legends to indomitable wee women who coped with poverty and drunken husbands.

Each year, these lively, original poems are a testament to the sheer vitality and resilience of everyday Scots and how in the contemporary world it remains a valid medium for examining the human condition in all its complexities. The poems also show the wealth of creative talent lurking in our small country.

All variants of the Scottish tongue will be welcomed in the competition, from the classic scholarly version of the sixteenth-century Makars and MacDiarmid's Lallans to the sharp contemporary demotic of the cities and the traditional speech of Scotland's rural areas, from Ayrshire to Aberdeenshire, Moray to Fife, Galloway to the Northern Isles.

As well as welcoming a wide interpretation of what constitutes Scots, the judges will not penalise the inevitable intrusion of some English in the entries. After all, Burns himself used the two languages in conjunction unselfconsciously, often in the same poem. Our poets will be required to offer material predominantly Scots in idiom and vocabulary.

They may submit up to three (original and unpublished) entries. Poems should be no longer than 30 lines and can be in any poetic form, from sonnet to free verse. They can be serious, light-hearted, lyrical, satirical, elegiac or visionary, personal or polemical. The judges will look for creative flair combined with the effective use of the Scots language.

The judges will be Edwin Morgan, Scotland's poet laureate; Liz Lochhead, Glasgow's poet laureate; Alan Riach and Nigel Leask, Professors of Scottish and English Literature respectively at Glasgow University; and myself.

The winners will be announced in early autumn. The Herald retains the right to reprint any submitted poem and the entries will be deposited in the National Library of Scotland as an insight into the spirit of Scotland at this juncture in the nation's history.

Fancy your chances? Here's how to enter
Entries, on A4 paper and printed, typed or neatly written on one side of the sheet, should bear the sender's name, address and contact phone number on the reverse. They should be addressed to: Lesley Duncan, poetry editor, The Herald, 200 Renfield Street, Glasgow G2 3QB.

Material submitted from abroad may be e-mailed to us at the following address: lesley.duncan@theherald.co.uk.

E-mailed entries should include an address and phone number with international prefixes.

Entries should arrive no later than August 1.