The linguistic background

Norn was the dominant language in Orkney and Shetland for at least 500 years, but a natural consequence of the political changes beginning in the late Middle Ages was a gradual shift from Norn to Scots. Owing to the scarcity of written sources we have neither a complete documentation of the structure of the Norn language nor of the rate and character of the process of change. There is an ongoing, heated debate considering the actual demise of Norn (Barnes vs. Rendboe), where a group of “Nornomaniacs” (cf. Waugh 1996) argue that it lived on at least until the end of the 19th century in Shetland. What real evidence there is, however, suggests that in both Orkney and Shetland it died out no later than the second half of the 18th century.

Today, the traditional dialects as spoken in the Northern Isles must be described as varieties of Scots, yet with a substantial component of Scandinavian, manifested above all in the lexicon but also in phonology and, to a lesser extent, in grammar. These varieties are often referred to as “Insular Scots”, recognized as one of the four main dialect divisions of Lowland Scots (cf. Grant and Murison 1931–1976; Johnston 1997).

Orkney and Shetland can be characterized as bidialectal speech communities with access to a choice of two discrete, definable forms of speech: one a form of standard, basically Standard Scottish English, and the other what Wells (1982) calls traditional-dialect. Orcadians and Shetlanders are generally aware of commanding two distinct varieties and they have names for these, e.g. “English” vs. “Shetland” or “Orcadian”. Admittedly, age-related differences have been observed: on the one hand young people are losing some of the traditional-dialect indexicals, on the other they often state explicitly that they do not wish to adapt to outsiders and tend to be scathing about islanders who do. It would, however, be difficult to find truly monolingual speakers of the traditional dialect today.

As some of the recordings will reveal, the “either-or” scenario is probably not quite categorical, especially not with regard to phonology. In fact, there may well be something of a continuum, where certain traditional-dialect features are stable, such as the palatalization of dental plosives, whereas others vary with the speaker, the situation, and the topic, such as th-stopping. The following account of Orkney and Shetland phonology is not restricted to one end of the continuum and includes some observations on the considerable regional variation found in the Northern Isles. The presentation should be viewed as a complement to the full-length description of Scots/Scottish English in this volume (cf. the contributions by Stuart-Smith, this volume, and Miller, other volume); in other words, it focuses on features where Orkney and Shetland accents differ from other accents in Scotland.