The
Language of Shetland
The Shetlanders of the present day are English-speakers, but of a distinctive dialect, quite unlike any other in the British Isles. Both the accent and a large part of the vocabulary make it a unique tongue. The islands have been inhabited for over 5,000 years, but nothing is known of the language spoken until the late Iron Age, around 700-800 A.D. Even then, it is only a few words which are known. As would be expected, the language was similar to that spoken in the nearest land masses, namely Orkney and northern Scotland. At that time, Shetland was part of the Pictish kingdom, a country consisting of much of the northern part of present-day Scotland. Ethnically, these people were Celtic, and the language spoken by the people (or by the influential people in society, at any rate) was the Pictish branch of Celtic. The few writings they have left are in the form of inscriptions on stones in the Pictish alphabet, Ogham. These writings can be transcribed into the Latin alphabet, but translation is fraught with difficulty. All that can be identified for certain are personal names, e.g. Kenneth, on the Lunnasting Stone.
During the later part of Shetland’s Pictish history, other Celtic peoples came to Shetland. These were the Irish monks, who brought the Christian gospels to the islands. They spoke a different branch of Celtic, namely Gaelic, but doubtless this language would have been readily understood by the native Shetlanders. A few of the words from this Gaelic language were retained by the later Norse settlers, who first arrived around 800, and these survived into the 19th century, when they were recorded. There are a small number of place names which are thought to be Celtic in origin, principally the names of two of the larger islands, Yell and Unst. These names survive because they were retained by the Norse population.
Shetlandic, is essentially a form
of Scots. Although these are frequently different from the forms found in contemporary
Mainland Scots dialects, which tend to converge preterites and past participles
- e.g. 'I fun(d) it' rather than 'I fan(d) it' - the Shetlandic forms can be found
in writers of more traditional Scots. In this respect, the grammar of Shetlandic
is more conservative than that of most forms of Mainland Scots. Shetlandic exhibits
a number of features typical of traditional Scots, such as the use of singular
verb forms with plural nouns but not with plural pronouns (e.g. 'Da men wis comin
haem' but 'Dey wir comin haem'.) Shetlandic
does not use the singular past tense of the verb to be with plural pronouns as
most forms of contemporary Mainland
Scots do. Shetlanders seem to have learned to pronounce the unvoiced velar
fricative 'ch', as in 'loch', which non-Scots speakers of English seem to find
difficult. The vowel systems of modern Orkney
and Shetland dialects are Scots' rather from Norn speakers, with a rich vowel
system but relatively small number of consonant phonemes. The structure of the
syllable, which generally consists of either a short vowel followed by a long
consonant, or a long vowel followed by a short consonant, a characteristic of
the Scandinavian languages.
Certain features of consonant phonology in Shetlandic- such as the lack of a phonological
distinction between initial 'qu' as in queen, and 'wh' as in wheel - which are
almost certainly of Norse origin. It is generally thought that the tendency of
Shetlandic to turn initial and medial voiced and unvoiced 'th' into 'd' and 't'
respectively is because of the previous loss of the 'th' sounds in Norn - compare
the extant Nordic languages, all of which, with the exception of Icelandic, have
lost the 'th' sounds. Another consonant feature, the palatalisation of certain
consonants in certain circumstances, is related to changes in the preceding vowel
sound. Palatalisation, such as the change of c in Irish to t in Manx, is a common
feature, not only of Manx place-nomenclature,
but of the Manx language itself. Changes which are described as 'soft mutation'
- are not phonological in themselves, in that they do not affect meaning, they
do impinge upon phonology because they are related to the convergence of phonemes
in certain localities-the pronunciation of hael (whole) as 'hell' in the Central
Mainland and 'heel' in the Northern Isles. To characterise Shetlandic as a form
of Scots is not to underestimate the profound influence of Norn upon its vocabulary
in particular. The influence of Norn may also be seen in less obvious features
of Shetlandic vocabulary. Ecclesiastically, the Isle of Man was divided into seventeen
parishes, and each of these parishes had a patron saint from whom it derived
its name. In our earliest Manorial
Roll (1511-15) these were simply called lands.
Orkney
and Shetland remained under the rule of Norse earls until 1231, when the line
of the jarls became extinct. In that yeare the earldom of Caithness was
granted to Magnus, second son of the Earl
of Angus, whom the king of Norway apparently confirmed in the title. Recent studies
from the field of population genetics reveal a significant percentage of Norse
ethnic heritage -- up to one third of the Y chromosomes on the islands are derived
from western Norwegian sources, as opposed to the Shetlands, where over half the
male lineage is Norse. When the islands were given as security for the princess's
dowry, there seems reason to believe that it was intended to redeem the pledge,
because it was then stipulated that the Norse system of government and the law
of Saint Olaf should continue to be observed
in Orkney and Shetland.
Both Norn and Scottish Gaelic are probably
completely extinct if their relationship to Goidelic
Celtic is endangered. The variant of Gaelic's geographic location in Scotland
rural areas of the Western Isles: Lewis, Harris, North Uist, South Uist, Barra,
Skye, and a few locations in the rest of the Inner Isles and the Highland mainland;
mainly Sutherland, Ross-Cromarty,
Inverness, and Argyll
counties.
| Old Shetlandic (Norse-based) -- Norn Shetlandic (or "ns"). |
| Modern Shetlandic (West Germanic) -- Scots Shetlandic (or "ss"). | |
| Old Orkney (Norse-based "Orcadian") -- Norn Orkney (or "no"). | |
| Modern Orkney (West Germanic) -- Scots Orkney (or "so"). |