Ganfer 3

3. Phonology, Linguistics, and the Shetland Establishment.

Contrary to the impression often given that Shetland dialect is an indefinable continuum of regional variations, or virgin soil waiting to be researched from scratch, the basic phonology of Shetlandic - including the Æ or AE vowel - has been understood for well over half a century. The fundamentals, comprising twelve vowel phonemes, can be found in the article ‘Shetland Dialect’ by J.C. Catford in Shetland Folk Book 3, 1957 - available on my website - with two additions to the inventory by the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland, 1986, and one further in my article 'Some Characteristics of the Shetlandic Vowel System,' Scottish Language, 2000 - also on my website. The article by Gunnel Melchers and Peter Sundkvist on Orkney and Shetland in ‘Lesser-Known varieties of English’ (Sheier, Trudgill et al. 2010) contains a discussion of Shetland vowel phonology (p.23-28) including a table of the Shetland vowels (p.24) citing my 'Characteristics' article and its descriptions of Shetland vowel mutation (which I call ‘soft mutation’) and of the long /i:/, /u:/ and /ø:/ vowels.

There is also a one-page summary of the essential Shetlandic vowels in my old orthography in the appendix to my ‘Guid Unkens efter Mark - Mark’s Gospel in Shetlandic’ 1999 (recently remaindered to the Christian bookshop in Lerwick) and a list in Sjætlan orthography in my recent PDF with accompanying video, ‘Shetlandic Vowels - A Short Guide.’ 

Two of the essential features of Shetlandic phonology, which must be understood in order to create a systemic (as opposed to merely systematic) orthography, are vowel length and soft mutation.

Lack of recognition of vowel length leads to potentially contrastive vowels being undifferentiated (e.g. the respective short and long ‘ee’ sounds in ‘need’ /nid/ (require) and ‘need’ /ni:d/ (sprain, strain) which stems from the long vowel in Old Norse hníta.)

Lack of recognition of soft mutation is the principal reason for confusion over the identity and pronunciation of the Æ phoneme. Both of these are explained on my website - in linguistic terms in my ‘Some Characterisics...’ paper, but also represented directly in my Sjætlan orthography, which uses the acute accent to mark the long vowel, as in Old Icelandic, and spells the two words above as <nyd> and <nýd>. (The modern Icelandic /i/ rather than the Old Norse or continental Scandinavian /y/ sound of the letter Y.)

Lack of recognition of soft mutation leads certain postmodernist academic linguists down rabbit holes where they not only fail to recognise the identity of phonemes, but postulate mergers on the basis of confusing the hard allophones of one phoneme with the soft allophones of another on the basis of superficial phonetic resemblance, even though they can never occur in the same phonetic environment. Linguists of a former generation did not do this.

This may be partly incompetence, and/or reflect a need to seem to find something new in order to appear to be doing original research. But it also reflects an ideological bias against recognising that Shetlandic functions systemically as a whole, or that it might have different phonological features from Scots or English. As Robert McColl Millar puts it on one forum, ‘I think we have to start from the precept that there is no one 'Shetland' or 'Orkney' dialect; rather, there are a range of dialects in both archipelagos which are similar to each other, but only at certain levels.’

Starting from this precept, and bypassing rather than building on the existing scholarship as compiled by scholars of an older generation such as Catford, you will inevitably find the Scots dialects with the indefinable continuum of variation you are looking for. If Millar had read my ‘Characteristics’ article, published in a journal of which he is now the editor, he would have made less mistakes - unless they should be regarded as ideological biases - in his ‘Northern and Insular Scots.’

The key is in the word ‘starting.’ The research was started - no doubt from a similar precept as a working hypothesis - well over half a century ago, and the common features of the Shetlandic dialects emerged from that. But to build upon this would be contrary to the anti-prescriptive ideology with its emphasis on variation which is de rigeur in Scottish linguistics.

It also serves the Anglophonograph hegemony better to represent Shetlandic in terms of a taxonomy based on the standard English of southern England - the Wellsian lexical sets - where it can be made to appear almost to consist of exceptions, rather than in terms of its own coherent characteristics as represented by my Sjætlan orthography. This is rather like pre-Copernican astronomy, where the necessity to prove that the solar system revolved around the Earth rather than the Sun involved increasingly convoluted and obfuscatory calculations.

There is no point trying to get this recognised in the real world. Scottish academic linguists may fight among themselves, but they will form a defensive phalanx if their priesthood is threatened. Any guinea pigs observed to be walking on their hind legs must be reminded that, at their level in the linguistic hierarchy, IPA doesn’t stand for International Phonetic Alphabet, but India Pale Ale. And the guinea pigs don’t care that their brains are being picked for a gourmet dish of Cerveaux de Cobaye. One of the samples used by Millar was from a dialect enthusiast whom I knew, and when I pointed out the mistakes that he had made (the voice recordings were online) she made excuses for him on the basis that he wasn’t a Shetlander and couldn’t be expected to get it right.

Contrary to the various narratives which have circulated at various times, Shetland phonology is a coherent system which can be incorporated into a single orthographic representation, irrespective of etymology. On the other hand, it could not be reasonably incorporated into an orthography designed for Scots as a whole. This holistic phonological system is the basis of my Sjætlan orthography, and was also the basis of my original Shaetlan orthography, which at that time was based on making minimum essential alterations (perhaps 5%) to the English-based Shetland Dictionary style of spelling.

But where there’s ill-will, there’s no way. The Shetland Anglophonograph hegemony had to protect its vestment interests against any threat that ‘dialect’ would start to appear in domains where it was ‘not fitted.’ The term ‘Shetlandic’ - the obvious English translation of the eponymous ‘Shaetlan,’ (which goes back at least to J.J. Haldane Burgess’s ‘Rasmie’s Büddie - poems in the Shetlandic,’ published in 1913, and was often used in writing of the 20th Century - e.g. as the title of both a poem and CD by celebrated poet Rhoda Bulter) was condemned as being ‘jarringly jargonistic,’ and an ‘obviously political’ attempt by ‘Nornomaniacs’ to appear ‘Nordic.’ (This apparently being an insult.) Both this and ‘Shaetlan’ were replaced in writing, and increasingly in speech, by the meaningless mass category noun ‘dialect.’ Even at that level, a survey on Shetland literature elicited the response ‘Save us from dialect fascists.’

Any ‘talk’ of the traditional Shetland perception of not being Scottish (as reflected in the language in terms like ‘Scottie boats’ and ‘spaekin Scottie’ as opposed to ‘spaekin Shaetlan’) had to be - in the words of a Shetland journalist - ‘quashed,’ with reference to Oswald Mosley. On the Shetland forum Shetlink, posts in ‘dialect’ on serious subjects - which made the writers look ‘thick’ according to the moderators - raised vociferous objections and were segregated to a sub-forum. (Ironically, or perhaps sarcastically, the journalist who described the word ‘Shetlandic’ as ‘jarringly jargonistic’ now calls his Youtube channel ‘Shetlandic.’) This is the narrative which has dominated for at least the last two decades.

Any consolidation of spelling, or systemic phonological representation of Shetlandic as a whole rather than as an indefinable continuum of variation, was obviously contrary to that narrative. I eventually got fed up being used as a bad example of the ‘horrible abortion’ created by the expository use of ‘dialect,’ and gave up writing in my native language. If I had lived in Shetland, and had been constantly exposed to popular opinion as well as that of the media, literati and intelligentsia, I would probably have given up sooner. At my class reunion, the only person who mentioned my interest in ‘Shaetlan dialect’ did so only in order to inform me that teaching it would kill it off.

In one Youtube video about the Nynorn project (there wrongly presented as a language revival attempt, but actually a private hobby) a young Norwegian commented that Ivar Aasen, the compiler of Nynorsk, was the most hated man in Norway. Fortunate, then, that the Shetland establishment saw the writing on the wall, and took swift action to make sure that the Shetland dialects remained at a sub-literate level, and avert any threat that they might have posed to the psychological, educational, and particularly the economic, welfare of Shetland youth.

There is more from this era in the introductory and ‘Real Life and Death’ sections of this website, and it is documented - with references to my own attempts (John M. Tait) at the time - by Atina Nihtinen in her thesis ‘Ambivalent Self-Understanding, 2011,’ which is available online. There is also a paragraph relating to my writings at the time in the introduction to Peter Sundkvist ‘The Shetland Dialect.’