Nynorn
This is an edited version of comments I made on a Youtube video about Nynorn. I have included it here because - apart from section 3 - most of it relates to the situation of Shetlandic in Shetland rather than to Nynorn as such.
Embedded Files
Shetlandic in a Parallel Universe
Introduction
The following is an edited version of my comments on a Youtube video about Nynorn, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBt-bCnbhq0&t=22s
The video as a whole gives the impression that there is a movement afoot in Shetland to revive the Norn language previously spoken there, much as Cornish in Corwall and Manx in the Isle of Man. In fact, the Nynorn project has nothing to do with Shetland, and seems to be a private hobby:
https://nornlanguage.x10.mx/index.php?nynorn
Several Shetlanders had replied, pointing out that there was no such movement, and while one or two were interested, most were of the realistic opinion that there was no chance that this project would be adopted in Shetland. Several commented that Shetlanders already spoke a dialect of Scots, and the impression was given that Shetlanders as a whole were interested in this, and that there were efforts to ensure its survival.
Although the first premise of the video - the idea of a Nynorn revival - was mistaken, it raises several questions which are relevant to the actual language spoken in Shetland.
Comments on Nynorn Video
I was given this link by a friend. Although I’m not interested in Nynorn as such, I am a Shetlander with a long term interest in my native tongue.
Since the word ‘Shetlandic’ is not used in Shetland - I’ll get onto that later - and has been used in this video with a different meaning, and also to avoid convoluted expressions and ambiguity, I’ll use the word ‘Sjætlan’ to describe the language currently spoken in Shetland. That is, what is described in this video as the Shetland dialect of Scots - I describe it as a form of Scots on a Norse substratum. That language is my native language, and Sjætlan(d), which simply means ‘Shetland,’ is the traditional term. The spelling is from an experimental orthography of my own, based loosely on that of Old Norse. (This, by the way, has no more chance of being accepted in Shetland - which is not in any case its purpose - than Nynorn does.)
1. Nynorn
This whole video manages to give the false impression that there is some sort of movement to revive Norn in Shetland. Nynorn is a conlang - an a posteriori (as opposed to a priori, or invented from scratch) constructed language. I don’t know if any of the people - or the person - involved in it have anything to do with Shetland. At any rate, as several people have commented, hardly anyone in Shetland has heard of it, and there is no chance whatsoever that it is going to be adopted there as a revival project. Shetlanders don’t even want a recognised spelling for their living language, let alone learning a dead one. This makes a lot of the comments made in the video - such as ‘how are they going to revive a language’ and ‘if it goes ahead and it’s successful’ completely irrelevant to begin with.
As various people have commented , Shetland already has a distinctive language of its own - although the description of it as a ‘rich dialect of Scots’ is part of the problem. This is why I’m referring to it here as ‘Sjætlan,’ which is my spelling of the native term. The main point, though, is that until recently this language was the spoken language of almost all Shetlanders, and that it is now dying out - going off a cliff-edge - in much the same way that Norn did. However, the fact that it is not recognised as a language, but described increasingly by the mass word ‘dialect,’ means that the Shetland intelligentsia can divert attention from this into other narratives.
So a more pertinent question than the revival of Norn is - why, when Shetland already has one of the most distinctive Anglic languages (languages descended mainly from Anglo Saxon) in the world - apart perhaps from pidgins and creoles - has it fallen under the radar to such an extent that people imagine that there might be an attempt to revive a dead one? Why is this regarded as more interesting than the living language that actually exists, which it is assumed can simply be swept aside? (It’s already being swept aside by standard English, but that’s another matter.) And why has that language been sidelined by the Shetland authorities, media, and intelligentsia into a Scottish linguistic and cultural ideology dominated by the literary exploitation of the speech of urban deprivation in the Central Belt of Scotland, as exemplified in Trainspotting and the poems of Tom Leonard?
2. Nomenclature.
Various people have commented that nobody in Shetland uses the word ‘Shetlandic.’ Nobody says it, because it’s an English word, and the native term is ‘Sjætlan(d)’ which simply means ‘Shetland.’ But in the mid to late 1900s the term was often used in writing, as a natural translation of this. What else would you call, in English, the language of a place called ‘Shetland’? But various members of the Shetland media and intelligentsia denigrated it, describing it as ‘jarringly jargonistic,’ ‘obviously political,’ and complaining that it was an attempt to make ‘dialect’ look ‘Nordic’ or ‘like Icelandic,’ and like a language rather than like dialect. And, since the word was not used in speech, this narrative was largely accepted by the Shetland population, and by dialect enthusiasts in particular.
So the reason nobody in Shetland uses this term in writing is owing to a campaign of suppression, not unlike that used by political populists to get people to vote against their own interests, intended to keep the native tongue at a level where it can be sidelined. Also, far from the idea that Norn might be revived, the use of ‘Nordic’ and ‘like Icelandic’ as insults shows how anti-Nordic expressions can be used by the intelligentsia and media as a means of populist suppression narratives in Shetland, by restricting the vocabulary which is popularly perceived as being acceptable.
This has also been largely effective at altering the nomenclature used in speech. So instead of the native term ‘Sjætlan’ (or ‘Shaetlan’ - see below) being used in writing instead of ‘Shetlandic,’ that term has largely been replaced, in speech as well as writing, not by the term Shetland Dialect - although that is used as well - but by the unqualified mass noun ‘dialect.’ Communications by ShetlandForWirds often use that term in this way, contrasting ‘English’ with ‘dialect.’ This has become so accepted that I have heard people say ‘Sh-dialect,’ switching from ‘Sjætlan’ to what is now perceived as the more acceptable term, and a Shetland poet taking part in a Nordic convention commented that she was the only one writing ‘in dialect.’
This may be partly owing to there being no recognised way to spell the word ‘Sjætlan.’ My pre-experimental spelling of ‘Shaetlan,’ which was designed to represent Shetland phonology accurately using English-like spellings, was once described by dialect enthusiasts as looking like a spelling mistake, presumably because it altered the inaccurate E in the English spelling ‘Shetland.’ When all the other options have been suppressed, the only one left is ‘dialect.’
The effect of this is to rob the language of any perceived status or definition. So people on the Shetland forum Shetlink can complain about ‘crap written in dialect’ and have the offending posts quarantined to a forum created for the purpose. It also enables the local independent radio station - so I am told - to have a non-dialect policy. This, it would appear, is not ‘political.’
As ‘dialect,’ Sjætlan has no written form, and although orthography was mooted in the past, the emphasis now is on showing variations in dialect by differences in spelling. This creates a vicious circle, because those who don’t want to read ‘crap written in dialect,’ or the Shetlink mods who say that ‘dialect’ is difficult to read, and that people who write in it look ‘thick,’ are also opposed to an orthography which would give it a recognised written form.
3. On Specific Features of Nynorn
Although I’m not interested in the Nynorn project per se, some aspects of it show how the actual traditional language of Shetland - Sjætlan - has been bypassed.
Phonology
I’m bemused by the idea that Nynorn wouldn’t want to retain the rolled Rs of Icelandic. Of all the Nordic languages - I speak some Swedish, and am reasonably familiar with what the others sound like - my R sound is more like the Icelandic than any of them. It’s certainly nothing like the uvular R of Danish, Skånska (southern Swedish) or some Norwegian dialects, or the standard Swedish one that survives in colouration of an adjacent consonant. (I think Finnish Swedish accents may have something more like mine, but I haven’t come across them. Swedes sometimes say I speak like a Finn, but I think that’s mostly the intonation - or rather, lack of it.) It’s certainly nothing like the Faroese R that you usually hear, which seems to me to be retroflex or such, and sounds more like the R of a Caithness than a Shetland accent. Older Faroese recordings have an R more like mine, though, and I notice that Pól Arni Holm of the band Hamradun, who comes from Suðuroy, sings, at least, with one like that.
Also, unless I’m missing something, Nynorn seems to misrepresent the Shetland phonology almost as badly as dialect spellings do. It appears to have no way of representing long vowels, and since these are an essential aspect of both Old Norse and Sjætlan phonology - with Sjætlan often preserving Old Norse vowel length - it must obviously have been an essential part of Norn phonology too. But the first page of the Memrise course gives ‘rug’ as the spelling for rúg (my experimental spelling) /ru:g/ (heap) which is an everyday Sjætlan word to me, and certainly has a phonologically long /u:/ sound. As this preserves the long vowel from ON hrúga, and is recorded as having a long vowel by Jakobsen - which is presumably where they got it from - I don’t see how they can simply dispense with any way of indicating this. Similarly nýr (my spelling) /ni:r/ (kidney) ON nýra, another everyday word to me, which they spell ‘nyr.’ Again, Jakobsen records the long vowel.
I wondered at first if they were following the Scandinavian method of indicating short vowels by doubling the following consonant - as Jakobsen does - but if that had been the case, they should have had double final consonants on jøl, rum, and hus. I can’t access the project page to investigate this further.
Vocabulary
As regards the Norn component of the Sjætlan vocabulary, again someone has commented on the pronunciation; but since this is a linguistic video, I’ll make it more specific by using my experimental orthography and phonetic script. The lack of clarity here is again a result of the dialect emphasis, according to which words are spelt as alterations to English with little - and decreasing, as the language itself is replaced by standard English - perception of the underlying phonemes. Sjætlan as a whole has an underlying phonological system, just like any other language, and my orthography is designed with that as a starting point.
guster - /gustər/ - (squall.) As someone has commented, the first vowel is /u/. (In traditional Scots spelling, the OU grapheme represents /u/, but as this is not normally seen in Shetland, I don’t know the reason for it here. It may possibly be a localised variant - I had some relatives who pronounced nust, normally /nust/ as nowst /noust/. But that isn’t the usual pronunciation.)
hægri - /hegri/ (heron.) Again, the dialect spellings cause the problem. The vowel in my pronunciation is /e/ - that is, a closer vowel than the /ɛ/ implied by the ‘hegri’ spelling, if interpreted as reflecting English norms, and as it was pronounced in the video. In my pronunciation it’s not a long vowel, as someone has described it (although Jakobsen does record a long variant) but closer than the one given in the video. I use the grapheme Æ for this vowel. (Note that this doesn’t conform to Nordic conventions, where Æ would normally be more open than E - as also in the phonetic script below - but it echoes the AE spelling which has become common in the dialect spellings of certain words with that phoneme, and so has a degree of familiarity.)
(There is a more complicated problem here, relating to why this phoneme is not normally spelt as AE in this word. Briefly, it’s because, before voiced consonants, this phoneme merges with E /ɛ/ in Mainland (of Shetland) type dialects, and with Y /i/ in North Isles (e.g. Unst and Yell) type ones, so the underlying identity with the phoneme before voiceless consonants - e.g. pæt = peat - is not recognised. In my dialect, it remains distinct and does not merge.)
skóri - /sko:ri/ (immature gull.) As someone has pointed out, this has a phonologically long /o:/ vowel.
sjalder - /ʃældər/ (oyster-catcher) - OK.
kávi - /kæ:vi/ (blizzard) - OK.
It can be seen, by comparison with the phonetic script, how my orthography better represents Shetlandic phonology, and how dialect spellings can obscure it.
The front open /æ/ sound in the last two words are owing to a mutation that several Shetland vowels undergo before voiced consonants. This does not seem to be either a Scots or Norn characteristic - although the general effect is similar to that of i-mutation in Old Norse, the conditions are different - and may not occur in all dialects of Sjætlan.
In the case of the Æ phoneme, it is this pre-voiced allophone which merges with other phonemes in most dialects. The pronunciation would have been better - or more like mine, anyway - if they had been pronounced with the vowel in RP ‘hat’ and ‘badge’ respectively. Because these mutations are automatic to native speakers - technically, allophones - and vary a lot according to region, it is not necessary to show them in the spelling.
It should be emphasised that the above words are not ancient relics. Along with many other Norn words, they are part of everyday speech among Shetlanders of my generation (I was born in 1955.) Of course, I may be regarded as an ancient relic...
4. Historical Linguistics and Norn.
As regards historical linguistics and the role of Jakobsen, this was once a major focus, not of any attempt to revive Norn, but of recognition of the Norn components of Sjætlan. Since the late 1900s, however, this emphasis has largely been overturned in favour of an emphasis on variety of dialect, which is conceived as ‘just what you speak,’ and an adoption of the anti-orthographic, anti-purist ideology of the most influential figures in Scots language promotion.
Particularly influential in this regard has been Brian Smith, Shetland Archivist, who ironically takes a ‘non interventionist’ stance towards ‘dialect.’ As editor of the New Shetlander and general go-to pundit on Shetland matters, he has railed for decades against ‘Nornomaniacs’ and ‘Jeremiahs’ who think that ‘dialect’ is dying out, and that something ought to be done about it. As the key speaker in a 2004 conference on dialect - the booklet printed afterwards had DIALECT in capital letters on the cover - he 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.’ He also used something I had written, which used Sjætlan in an expository context, as an example of the sort of ‘horrible abortion’ that occurs when ‘dialect’ which has ‘practically no power of abstract expression’ is used where it is ‘not fitted.’ Although he had always maintained that Shetland dialect was not dying out, in a later forum exchange he said that there was no use ‘seiching’ (presumably an attempted dialect translation of ‘hyperventilating’) about it if the only alternative was ‘brainwashing the children.’
This is the narrative which has gained purchase in Shetland, which informs outside inquirers, and under which all efforts are constrained to operate if they are not to be described in public speeches as horrible abortions. It can be seen that in a place where the population has now mostly accepted this anti-Nordic, anti-developmental attitude towards their living native tongue, and where the key speaker at a dialect conference considers that teaching it seriously would be ‘brainwashing the children,’ the idea of reviving Norn per se is beyond phantasmagorical. The obsession with Nordic things described in the video is confined largely to pageantry such as Up Helly Aa, dismissed by those of Smith’s ideology as the relics of 19th Century nationalist romanticism. Similarly, Smith describes interest in Norn as yearning for a mythical golden age. If this video had been on Shetland Dialect rather than Nynorn, it would have had little alternative but to reflect this narrative, because it is the only one left standing.
On the other hand, it is clearly this situation which has given rise to the idea that Shetland is like Cornwall or the Isle of Man in speaking only a slightly different form of English - or of Scots, which suffers from the same ideological denigration - and a place where they might be willing to revive a dead and scarcely documented language.
Note that, when the video states that Jakobsen was documenting Norn ‘As it was disappearing in the late 19th Century’ this is not strictly correct. What he collected were not so much remembered words from Norn per se - this was mostly in the sayings - as Norn words used in the Sjætlan language at the time, or shortly before that, although many of those were probably already obsolescent. However, as I have said above, many Norn words remain in the everyday speech of my generation, at least.
It should be emphasised, however, that Sjætlan as spoken by my generation is a coherent language, not a Frankensteinian assemblage of dismembered parts. There has been a tendency in the past to see it in terms of its antecedents - whether Scots, English, or Norn. But native Shetland speakers do not worry or even know about the origins of the words they use, any more than English speakers worry about which words are from Old English, Norman French, Greek, Latin, or Hindi. The fact that it has always been regarded - by those who write about it, not necessarily by its speakers - as a dialect of something or the remnants of something else is part of the reason why it is in such steep decline.
5. As a Dialect of Scots.
As regards being regarded as a dialect of Scots, this is a relatively recent emphasis. Sjætlan was traditionally regarded as a dialect - as many marginalised languages are - but probably more a dialect of English, although with consciousness of its Scots and Nordic connections. When I was young, fisherman from the North East of Scotland were ‘Skǫtis’ who spoke ‘Skǫti’ as opposed to ‘Sjætlan,’ and incomers from there who settled in Lerwick were known as ‘Lerwík (’Lerrick’) Skǫtis.’ The traditional Shetland cultural and linguistic identity was certainly non-Scottish, and there was a traditional awareness of the deprivation caused by the introduction of Scottish feudalism, including the proverb, ‘Nothing good ever came from Scotland except for dear meal and bad clergymen.’ (Næthing gød iver kam fæ Skǫtland ales dýr mæl an bad minísters.) However, this perception of Shetland cultural identity has been suppressed - ‘cancelled’ - as effectively as the linguistic one. When a discussion about it started on a forum, and several Shetlanders of my generation agreed that this was the traditional Shetland identity, another member of the Shetland media - Malachy Talack - wrote to ‘quash this talk,’ saying that Shetland identity and language were no more unique than different styles of brickwork in English counties, and mentioning Oswald Mosley.
There is no doubt that Sjætlan is most accurately described as a form of Scots. I describe it as a form of Scots on a Norse substratum. It might be said to be a form of Scots roughly in the same way that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are all forms of Scandinavian. However, the designation as a ‘dialect’ of Scots has the effect, not only of denigrating the Norn element - which is an indispensible part of traditional speech - but of falling under the influence of Mainland Scots ideology.
When the Faroese emancipated their language, they had the example of Icelandic to learn from. Since the Norse connection has been cancelled out of the narrative, Shetland dialect enthusiasts only have the example of Scots, which is dominated by an anti-purist, anti-orthographic ideology, and where the literary celebration of urban deprivation - as in Trainspotting - is emphasised over the traditional dialects. One of the most lauded Scots promoters - James Robertson - has written that Scots must not have a standard orthography as that would ruin its valuable ‘less than respectable’ connotations as compared to standard English. When I criticised this on one of my websites, I was asked by Shetland dialect enthusiasts to remove my criticisms, as I had been identified by one of Robertson’s cronies as ‘the man who disagrees with James.’ This echoes the Scottish situation, where proponents of orthographic norms are described by writers and academics as ‘language dictators,’ ‘language extremists’ and ‘linguistic fascists,’ and demonstrates how far this Scottish ideology has a grip on Shetland dialect enthusiasm.
So Nynorn does highlight some important questions. Some people put immense dedication into trying to revive languages - whether Cornish, Manx or Wampanoag - which have been dead for varying amounts of time, and giving them a written form is always an important part of such efforts. So how has enthusiasm for the living Shetland language been suppressed to the extent that it can only be referred to as ‘dialect?’ Why is it accepted almost without question that it cannot have a written form other than alterations to standard English spellings? And why do ‘dialect’ enthusiasts have as a key speaker at a conference someone who regards it as being a ‘horrible abortion’ if it appears where it is ‘not fitted,’ and considers that the only alternative to letting it die out would be to ‘brainwash’ children?
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