Explanation

Sjætlan is the word Shetland, as pronounced by a Shetlander, written in an orthography - spelling - derived from Old Icelandic.

My name is John Magnus Tait. I am a Shetlander who has been interested in my native tongue for most of my life. At one time, I was involved in writing in it in local magazines, ran a website called Inbuis ta Shaetlan, translated Mark’s gospel as Guid Unkens efter Mark - Mark’s Gospel in Shetlandic, and briefly represented my native tongue in a linguistic and cultural project in the UHI (University of the Highlands and Islands) before the project was taken over by academics from the Central Belt of Scotland. Prior attempts to promote this project in Shetland were instantly rebuffed.

As well as the name of the place, Sjætlan is the native term for the traditional language. This can best be described as a form of Scots on a Norse substratum, deriving from the Norn language formerly spoken there. In the latter half of the 20th Century there was a lot of concern about the tongue dying out, it was often referred to in English writing as ‘Shetlandic,’ and there were discussions about whether it should have a standard spelling. Since I am interested in both the Scots and Nordic languages (I live in the North East of Scotland) and have had an interest in the emancipation and development of marginalised languages since I first saw W.B. Lockwood’s Faroese primer in the Lerwick library when I was at school, I took the view that my native tongue should be developed as a language, with a standard orthography, grammar and dictionary.

However, around the turn of the century, this view - which was never popular - began to be systematically repudiated in Shetland. The word ‘Shetlandic’ was condemned - variously described as ‘jarringly jargonistic,’ ‘obviously political,’ and an attempt to appear ‘Nordic’ - and the native term ‘Shaetlan’ largely replaced in speech by the meaningless mass noun ‘dialect.’ Interest in the considerable Norn component of the Shetland tongue was routinely dismissed - especially in editorials in the New Shetlander - as ‘Nornomania,’ and those who believed it was dying out (ie, anyone with eyes, ears and functioning brain cells) were described as ‘Jeremiahs.’ (Forgetting that if Jeremiah hadn’t been right, he would have been forgotten.) The local media outlets were taken over by a generation of literati largely influenced by the Scottish literary model, where the Scots language is valued for its ‘less than respectable’ connotations and propensity for expressing urban deprivation, as specified by James Robertson and exemplified in the writings of Tom Leonard and Irvine Welsh. My writing - which obviously conflicted with those models - began to be used as a bad example (‘horrible abortion’) by the local intelligentsia, and my translation of Mark similarly by a member of the local clergy. I eventually became discouraged and, around 2010, I gave up writing in my native tongue altogether, and did not do so for many years.

However, one of my other interests is conlanging - that is, inventing constructed languages - a hobby often associated with Tolkien (a figure doubtless despised as sub-literary by those who idolise Tom Leonard) and which has been more recently popularised by its use in films and series such as Game of Thrones and Avatar. There are essentially two types of conlang, or constructed language, although they may be divided into sub-types. One is a priori - that is, invented from scratch. This is the type I find most interesting, and I have created one which bears little resemblance to any real language. The other is a posteriori - that is, languages which might plausibly have developed in the real world. An example would be how English might have developed without the French influence of the Norman Conquest, or the British language (which now survives as Welsh and - barely - as Breton and Cornish) without the Anglo Saxon conquest. These could be seen as developments in parallel universes.

One example of an a posteriori conlang is Nynorn, which is an attempt to reconstruct Orkney and Shetland Norn. Although it is the living Shetlandic language that I am interested in rather than its dead antecedents, it is instructive to look at the Nynorn website, and to compare the effort and scholarship dedicated to this essentially private hobby (not, as far as I am aware, by a Shetlander) to that given to ‘dialect’ on the ShetlandForWirds website, which sets out to promote something which has no name, definition, or written form; where any attempt to give it the prerequisites of basic literacy has been systematically repudiated; and where the current convener has written an article in which he states that he is contributing to the decline of Shetland dialect by refusing to conform to its traditional grammar, and refers to more traditional speech and writing as ‘broad.’

I had accumulated considerable knowledge about my native tongue - mainly its phonology, which was poorly documented. This was of little or no interest in Shetland, where knowledge about ‘dialect’ is contra-indicated under the prevailing Lowland Scottish narrative, which is based on maintaining general ignorance and pursuing a policy of endemic illiteracy. But although the terminal decline of my native language was now irreversible, there was nothing to stop me using it as an a posteriori conlang, and exploring what it might have been like in a parallel universe.

This couldn’t be exactly what I would have hoped for in my own universe. My original recommendations for spelling my native tongue had been based on the Shetland Dictionary approach of using English-type spelling conventions, simply because these were more familiar. But that could only have worked by adopting agreed conventions for representing the underlying phonology of the language as a whole; and since that approach was contrary to the prevailing dialect narrative, the use of English-type spellings would now simply be seen as variations. The only way to distance my approach from the designer chaos which had been used to suppress the real language was to adopt a different sort of spelling altogether, and I decided to model it mainly on that of Old Icelandic, which has more salient means for directly representing the underlying Shetlandic phonology than that of either English or the continental Scandinavian languages.

In my parallel universe, the words ‘Shetlandic’ and ‘Shaetlan’ obviously wouldn’t have been condemned or sidelined as they have been in the imposition of the prevailing dialect narrative. So the native term would be Sjætlan - the real native term written in my Shetlandic orthography - and its English translation would be Shetlandic. As the form Sjætland also occurs, I have adopted the convention of using Sjætland for the place and Sjætlan for the language.

In spite of being presented as a conlang, the resultant language is real - my real native language. The difference from what is now known in Shetland simply as ‘dialect’ is that, rather than being consigned to a sub-educational, sub-academic and largely sub-cultural level by the Shetland establishment, it is given a written identity corresponding to its spoken identity. Rather than being represented on Scottish forums as ‘the Shetland dialect of Scots,’ it is represented as an entity in its own right. Rather than being thought of as an almost infinite assortment of apparently random regional variations, its underlying consistency is recognised. Rather than being seen as either the sad remnants of Norn or a quaint outlier of Scots, it is recognised as a coherent speech form combining grammar, phonology and lexicon from both these - and other - sources. Rather than being quarantined to a sub-forum reserved for 'crap written in dialect' which makes you look 'thick,' it is widely used on the internet. And rather than being consigned to an ideological strait jacket reserved for linguistic nonentities, where you are not supposed to refer to dictionaries, to use any older vocabulary, or to use any vocabulary at all in any modern or expository context, it may be developed as other languages are for use in any register.

Needless to say, this will be of no interest in Shetland, except perhaps to revive my usefulness as a bad example to the Shetland administration, intelligentsia, literati and clergy of what happens when ‘dialect’ is used in contexts where it is ‘not fitted;’ of ‘dictionary grubbing’ by those not posthumously awarded the status of genius; of the damage done by trying to ‘control’ or ‘restrict’ it by writing it down like any other language; of why translating from Greek or Hebrew into ‘dialect’ doesn’t work; or of the irritation to their refined literary sensibilities occasioned by the 'unnecessary archaisms' of their native tongue being put into writing at all. Although, since they definitively won the war against literacy about two decades ago, they should presumably no longer need bad examples.