Ganfer 1

1. Sjætlan - Shetlandic in a Parallel Universe.

Because my mother tongue is now irrevocably moribund, and my own attempts towards its consolidation and emancipation were definitively rebuffed around the turn of the millenium, I have recently decided to write up the real language as if it were a conlang, or constructed language, with an orthography based mainly on that of Old Icelandic. I have also resurrected the term ‘Shetlandic,’ which has been effectively cancelled in the real Shetland. 

The introductory section to the website explains the rationale behind the project, and it has some real world background from the past as well as texts - mostly my own old writings - in the Sjætlan orthography, with video and audio. This is, of course, a private hobby, having no relevance in the real Shetland. But the language is nevertheless my real mother tongue - given a place in society in a fictional Sjætland for which it is ‘not fitted’ in the real one - and the orthography is based on its real phonology.

Vór

Hýr koms da siker vór,

da son sjyns in sæ glig.

Mi yn rins, an mi harns

is tøm as a blán-ut æg.

Ju syken, an torn disdjasket

wi dis hweit leiht sae grim,

at wigs, an glints, an glanses,

an sabs a bǫdis hæm.

Hit wigs, an glints, an glanses,

læk lang wǽvs o da sý,

an mi kǫts hǫls, an mi sowls yns,

sjás op sæ hǫrabli.

(After Våren by Bo Bergman. Link to PDF and video)

I should point out that the choice of a Nordic style of orthography is not merely tokenistic, or an example of the ‘Nornomania’ which County archivist and New Shetlander editor Brian Smith railed against for decades as part of his definitively influential ‘non-interventionist’ campaign against any suggestion that something should be done about the decline of ‘dialect.’

I regard Shetlandic as a form (which is not to say that it can be treated as a dialect) of Scots on a Norn substratum, and like native speakers of any language, I use words from Norn, Scots, English and other sources without any consciousness of their etymology. However, until perhaps the late 1990s it was assumed that use of the Norn vocabulary was an important aspect of any revival of Shetlandic, especially in literature. This view, however, was decisively overturned roughly along with the millenium.

As the key speaker at the Dialect ’04 conference (2004) Smith mentioned Norn only ‘with a view to getting it out of the way,’ comparing Shetland dialect rather to dialects of Dorset as described in novels by Thomas Hardy, and declaring that by comparison we worry too much about it. To describe this natural concern about the demise of one’s mother tongue, he used evocative words like ‘mourn,’ ‘panic,’ ‘agitate,’ ‘agonise,’ ‘moan,’ ‘groan,’ and ‘hyperventilate.’ The impression was given that great poems of the recent past were successful in spite of, rather than because of, their extensive use of Norn vocabulary. ‘Dictionary grubbing’ was an exercise to be restricted to those posthumously identified (presumably by himself) as geniuses. Writing of my own was used as an example of the ‘horrible abortion’ created by using ‘dialect’ - which has ‘practically no power of abstract expression’ - where it is ‘not fitted.’

Although he had always maintained that Shetland dialect was not dying out, in a later forum exchange Smith said that there was no use ‘seiching’ (presumably an attempted dialect translation of ‘hyperventilating’) about it if the only alternative was ‘brainwashing the pupils.’ The fact that someone with these opinions was the keynote speaker at a conference subtitled ‘The development of Shetland dialect’ - and continues to be consulted about the subject - speaks volumes about attitudes to this marginalised autochthonous language in Shetland.

Incidentally, the word ‘brainwashing’ is not necessarily perceived as negative when it pertains to eliminating, rather than promoting, ‘dialect.’ A survey taken among young people in Shetland in 2010 (by Mercedes Durham) elicited the response that Shetland dialect was ‘hugely retarded,’ and that people who used it should be ‘brainwashed’ out of speaking, and especially typing - which presumably meant texting - it.

In retrospect, Smith’s paper - apparently the only one from the conference reproduced on the Shetland ForWirds website - could be seen as the final turning point in the abandonment of any threat to the Shetland establishment of a robust approach to the Shetland tongue, and the adoption of a postmodernist Lowland Scottish approach in which any remaining ‘Nornomania’ has been effectively quashed - by explicit Nornophobia - to make way for the Dorset of the North.

Shetland ForWirds, which was set up shortly after this, followed a similar path. My plea at the conference for a robust orthography and nomenclature (‘Shaetlan is Daed - Lang live Dialect’ - now on my website) was completely ignored. One of the early members of Shetland ForWirds - who had been absent from the session where I had given my paper - greeted me in the Shetland Times bookshop with ‘I hate dis “Shetlandic” at dey spaek aboot.’

Other speakers at the conference saw a future in areas like texting, simply because spelling and literacy issues were irrelevant there. (But see the ‘hugely retarded’ comment above.) Another later comment by a dialect enthusiast trying to avoid any issues of spelling was ‘Can we no just spaek it?’ Nobody took on board my comment that, when I was young, almost everybody just spoke it, and that trying to ‘just spaek it’ was only to try to recreate the circumstances of its demise.

This reflects what Michael P. Barnes said in ‘The Norn Language of Orkney and Shetland’ (p.26) - that one reason Norn died out was that there was ‘no motivation to preserve a low-prestige vernacular with no official status or written form.’ Brian Smith is fond of quoting Barnes to justify his Nornophobic attitudes, but either does not see or will not admit that the situation with the current Shetland tongue is comparable.

Soon - in direct denial of the warnings in my conference paper - the Shetland ForWirds website was using the mass noun ‘dialect’ almost exclusively, in phrases like ‘writing in dialect’ in contrast to ‘writing in English.’ A language with a name and identity set against an indefinable nonentity. I submitted some suggestions to Shetland ForWirds shortly after the conference, and discovered years later that both the office bearers I had sent it to had - in a remarkable feat of synchronised amnesia - ‘forgotten’ to submit it to the group. This may have been because it was largely about orthography, but more likely because it advised against following the lead of Scots pundit James Roberston, who stated that the value of Scots to writers lay in its intrinsic disreputability. I found out later that I had been identified by one of his cronies - Matthew Fitt - on a visit to Shetland as ‘the man who disagrees with James’ and I was asked by Shetland dialect enthusiasts to remove criticism of him from my website.

I eventually gave up writing in my native tongue when I was asked to remove everyday words to me - like ‘laalie’ meaning ‘toy’ (not at that time with the ‘Nornomaniac’ spelling ‘láli’) because young teachers reading them to children would just substitute the English word anyway. I had been told earlier by a teacher, influenced by another who was ‘keen on dialect’ and involved in Shetland ForWirds, that dialect was ‘juist whit you spaek,’ that it didn’t matter in dialect writing if pupils wrote ‘palm’ rather than ‘löf,’ and only ‘purists laek dee’ thought otherwise. Shetland ForWirds had become Shetland BackWirds.

The same teacher told me years later that Shetland schools had more things to do than teach children dialect. ‘Just what you speak’ is now, for most Shetland children, standard English. This - as I had warned to deaf ears in my conference paper - is how ratifying the word ‘dialect’ successfully reduced the tongue to educational, social, cultural and functional irrelevance.

The dialect perception, however, is not necessarily shared by those who don’t speak it. I was once shown a twitter feed (there was a reference in it to something I had written long ago that had apparently cropped up Shetland Library archives) by a Shetlander with a typical Shetland surname, perhaps in his thirties, who said he had responded to the occasional lesson in reading ‘dialect’ at school with ‘Oh no - here’s this language I don’t understand again.’ He complained that they couldn’t be expected to learn it by osmosis. Others commented that they understood most of it because they had grown up surrounded by it. This is a typical example of the crossover generation in a scenario of language death.

So contrary to accusations of ‘Nornomania’ by Nornophobes, I regard Shetlandic as a form of Scots on a Norn substratum, and approach it holistically. I chose Old Icelandic spelling as a starting point for my ‘Sjætlan - Shetlandic in a Parallel Universe’ project because it can directly represent the Shetlandic phonology as a whole, mostly avoids conflicts with the constant intrusion of English spelling norms (if anything about English spelling could be called a ‘norm’) and because, since my Sjætlan project is a private hobby, I don’t have to cater for anyone else’s concerns. (The same goes for my use of the deprecated term ‘Shetlandic.’)

In the parallel universe it is not necessary to resort to phonetic script, Wellsian lexical sets, or other arcane methods in order to represent the Shetlandic phonemes, as the orthography represents them directly by providing a user interface for them. It could be seen as ironic that the only systemic representation of the phonology of the real language is in a fictional universe.