Shetland dialect
Shetland dialect is a mixed language spoken in Shetland, an archipelago to the north of mainland Scotland. The exact number of speakers is not known, since it has to date never been included in any census. It emerged through the long-drawn and stable bilingualism of Norn and Lowlands Scots brought to Shetland from the early 15th century and onwards. Norn is an extinct North Germanic language, descended from Western Norse, which was spoken in Shetland until the late 19th century, though as of 2025, living memory reports the last known speaker to have died as late as 1925. This long-drawn contact situation resulted in a very distinct linguistic blend of Norn and Lowland Scots, with a noticeable contact influence of Low Germanic languages. It has been recognised as a highly distinct variety for centuries. The language retains many words of Norn origin. Many of them, if they are not place-names, refer to e.g. seasons, weather, topographical features, sea scapes, fishing, parts of boats and boat building, agriculture and crofting, crops and livestock, wool handling and knitting, peat cutting, stone building, music instrument building, and so on.
The language is a prototypical contact language in that it emerged due to a specific contact situation, as opposed to a high contact language, which has undergone a high degree of contact, but which has not emerged due to some specific contact situation. In addition, the language is a prototypical G-L mixed language, where the bulk of the grammar comes from the language of the original settlers and the bulk of the vocabulary comes from the new settlers.
The language aligns with both the Continental Scandinavian varieties and the Anglian varieties in having limited morphological fusion, with a few grammatical affixes and some non-linear ablaut, mainly in the temporal paradigms, with both strong verb|strong] and weak verbs. It has a rich word formation in compounding, similar to German and the Scandinavian languages. The pronominal system has two politeness distinctions and two numbers, and has three demonstrative distances. The nominal system has grammatical gender, expressed pronominally.
The language has traditionally been classified as, variously, a dialect of Scots or a dialect of English. However, the grammar of the language is remarkably aligned with that of Continental Scandinavian, while the lexicon is quite heterogenous. The vocabulary is thus a blend of Anglian and Norn, with a noticeable component of Dutch/Low German loanwords. On 15th October 2025, the language was formally recognised as a language by ISO 639 Maintenance Agency SIL Global and given the ISO 639-3 code
scz. the language has not been accepted as an official language in Shetland, and has never been used as an official medium of instruction in education, other than as a curiosity in occasional creative sessions. It has been used in fictional writing since at least the 19th century, especially in poetry, children's books, and comic strips or satire. Dictionaries of the language have been compiled and published since the mid-19th century.Formation
Shetland had been settled by a Celtic-speaking population by the time the Western Norse expansion started in the late 8th century. The majority seems to have belonged to the Pictish linguistic and cultural sphere, but it is possible that there were also Gaelic speaking Christian missionaries on the islands when the first Norse seafarers arrived. Exactly when this was is debated, but evidence suggests that the first settlements were as early as about 790–800 AD. It is also not known what happened to the pre-Norse population. Suggestions have been made that Shetland was completely depopulated in the catastrophic climate events of the mid-6th century, though this is debated. Shetland, together with Orkney and Caithness, was incorporated into the Kingdom of Norway in 875 as the Earldom of Orkney. However, in 1195 Shetland was placed directly under the rule of the Norwegian king and was made a tributary province to Norway, paying tax directly to the Norwegian king and ruled by the king's sysselman. This meant that Shetland's links with Orkney gradually diminished, although they shared a bishop and remained closer linked in the clerical domain.The linguistic ecology of Shetland and Orkney gradually continued to diverge for two main reasons. First, the Earldom of Orkney had been settled by a Scots speaking population from the middle of the 14th century. Second, there was an intense presence of the Hanseatic and Dutch North Sea fishing trade in Shetland, bringing with it an intense and sustained contact with Dutch and Low Germanic speakers in the late medieval and early modern period, whereas there was much less of a Low Germanic trade presence in Orkney during these centuries. This trade contact was not only long drawn, but also intense as well as steady, with numerous Hanseatic trading stations dotted all over Shetland. Some of these trading stations were large enough to resemble small settlements, and were inhabited for weeks, sometimes months, and sometimes over the entire winter. This contact would continue until the French and Napoleonic wars, and nearly seamlessly move from Hanseatic trade to the Dutch fishing trade. It was especially the trade for knitwear which made the Dutch fishing fleet arrive in the hundreds. This is also what gave rise to the town of Lerwick.
Lowland Scots speakers increasingly started settling in Shetland from the early 15th century onwards, especially in the southern areas of Shetland. The settlers were predominantly connected to the clergy, but were also landowners, administrators, traders and craftsmen. Lowland Scots increasingly established itself in Shetland in a socioeconomic top-down spread.
Shetland came under Danish rule with the union of Norway and Denmark in 1380. In 1468 Christian I of Denmark pawned Orkney to James III of Scotland as part of the dowry for Princess Margaret, then subsequently pawned Shetland in May 1469 as the second part of the dowry. There was a gradual administrative shift to Scottish rule, and the Lowlands Scots settlement also gradually increased. But Shetland remained a multilingual place, as reported by contemporary testimonies:
The "Commerce with the Hollanders" mentioned in the quote above refers to the intense trade for knitwear mentioned above.
Norn gradually declined, but remained spoken in Shetland at least until the early 19th century, if not later. Shetland would thus have been bilingual until at least then, but it is likely that it was a displacive contact situation, since Scots was the language of the new power holders. Archival evidence indicates that law and administrative officials in Orkney were unable and/or unwilling to recognise the speech of the local population; various documented complaints indicate that this kind of unwillingness and contempt on the part of the ruling class also occurred in Shetland.
The last known speaker of Norn is usually named as Walter Sutherland of Skaw in Unst of Foula as a rememberer of Norn songs, verses and riddles, and names her mother, Janet Manson as the last known person who used Norn conversationally. living testimony states that Janet Manson would speak it with one of her neighbours, an unnamed man. However, Janet and her neighbour did not call their language "Norn", but Danska Tonga.
Status as a mixed language
The long drawn and stable multilingualism between the 15th and 18th centuries resulted in the distinct blend that would become the pre-English language now spoken in Shetland. The fact that it arose in a specific contact situation by definition makes it a Contact Language. Specifically, it aligns with a prototypical G-L Mixed Language. It aligns with Bakker's 2017 model, which proposes that G-L languages will have the bulk of their grammar from the language of the original settlers and the bulk of their lexicon from the language of the new, more socioeconomically dominant settlers: in a cluster dendrogram the grammar of the language is near-identical to contemporary Continental Scandinavian grammar, while a phylogenetic network of the Swadesh 100-list of shows the language on the Anglian branch, but much more removed than Scots and English are from each other. The vocabulary is thus more heterogenous than the grammar.Adoption
Shaetlan Language Plan
In July 2022 Dr. Beth Mouat of the University of the Highlands and Islands submitted the Shaetlan Language Plan to the Shetland College board. It was adopted in its totality and made public in September 2022. It was the first de facto recognition of the language by a major public body. The international reactions by linguists working with minority languages around the world was one of great support and encouragement.The key aims of the Shaetlan Language Plan are to:
Phonology
Consonants
The language has 27 contrastive consonants:. Notice that the coronals are true dentals and not alveolars. Shetlanders are consistent in their code switching: the coronals are consistently dentals, unless Shetland English is spoken, in which case they are consistently alveolar.Vowels
Like all Germanic languages, the language is vowel rich. It has 12 phonemic vowels and 7 diphthongs: and.There are two phonemic front rounded vowels,.
In terms of lexical set values, the language has been described as follows:
- Vowel 11 occurs stem final.
- Vowel 3 is often retracted or diphthongised or may sometimes be realised.
- Vowel 7 may be realised before and before and.
- Vowel 8 is generally merged with vowel 4, often realised or before. The realisation in the cluster ane may be as in Mid Northern Scots.
- Vowel 15 may be realised or diphthongised to before.
- Vowel 16 may be realised or.
- Vowel 17 often merges with vowel 12 before and.
The language allows complex syllables of up to three onset and coda consonants.
Orthography
Like most stigmatised languages in a displacive contact situation, it has been in the double bind of not being standardised, therefore not being regarded as a language, and because it is not regarded as a language, there is opposition to any kind of standardisation. Yet, Shetlanders have been writing in their mother tongue since the mid-19th century, if not longer, as evidenced by the large body of especially poetry and dictionaries, but also children's books, comics and satires. Like with any stigmatised non-standard variety of highly literate communities, this has led to a variation of spelling, which is mostly an individual intuitive phonetic spelling. This variation to a certain extent also represents the varied pronunciation of the language varieties. However, the last couple of decades has seen a community consensus in digitalk.Latterly the use of the apologetic apostrophe to represent 'missing' English letters has been discouraged. A fully functional orthography was developed by Da Shaetlan Projict / I Hear Dee and has been used consistently in all their output.
Alphabet
The standard orthography developed by I Hear Dee uses a 28-letter Latin script alphabet:Morphology
The language allows both compounding and derivation. The derivational affixes are mostly Anglian, but there are some Dutch examples, such as the diminutive -kin < Middle Dutch -kijn/-ken.Grammatical functions are for the most part expressed analytically, through there are a few concatenative grammatical markers, such as the genitive marker or a few tense/aspect markers. The language, like all Germanic languages, has both strong and weak verbs, with a rich ablaut system for the latter.
Grammar
The grammar of the language aligns extremely closely with the Continental Scandinavian languages.Noun phrase
Nouns
The nouns of the language have two numbers - singular and plural; and three genders - masculine, feminine and neuter. The genders are expressed pronominally: concrete count nouns are either masculine or feminine, while abstract nouns and mass nouns are neuter. New, modern items are assigned genders, such as laptop and mobile phone. Weather and time dummies are masculine.There is a prolific associative plural ''an dem.''
Pronouns
Personal pronouns have two numbers, three persons and three genders in the third person singular. There is a politeness distinction for singular addressees.The politeness distinctions in the language follows a T–V distinction in that the familiar form is used by parents when speaking to children, old persons speaking to younger ones, or between familiar friends or equals and the polite form is used in formal situations and when speaking to superiors.
Both the dependent and the independent possessive pronouns inflect for two numbers, three persons and three genders in the third person singular.
| ' | ' | |
| 1 | my/mi | wir |
| 2 | dy/di | yir |
| his | dir | |
| her | dir | |
| hits | dir |
In the basi- and mesolectal varieties, the 1st and 2nd sg independent possessives agree with the number of the noun they refer to, a feature that was noticed already in the late 19th century. Acrolectal varieties have lost this feature.
The demonstrative is number invariant and has a three-way distal system: dis/yun/dat.
There are stressed and unstressed reflexive pronouns, which inflect for politeness in 2.
The indefinite article a is invariant. The definite article da is used in more contexts than in Standard English.
Verb phrase
Like all Germanic languages, it has both strong and weak verbs. The language has a number of reflexive verbs, which take the unstressed form of the reflexive pronoun as the second argument. Like in most languages with reflexive verbs, they are often verbs that involve change of location or posture. This does not translate well into Standard English, since the equivalent verbs are intransitive in Standard English.Tense-aspect-mood
The past tense is marked with the suffix –d/-t with weak verbs or nonlinearly with strong verbs. The perfect tense is universally marked with a form of be. Modality is expressed with modal verbs.Syntax
The language has a mirative copula come tae be 'it turns out that...'. There is an existential marker which inflects for the present and past tense: de ir 'there is' and de wir 'there was', where de < Norn de < Old Norse þet, the weak ablaut form of the demonstrative þat and ir/''wir < Norn er 'is' / var 'was' from vera/vesa 'be'.The language has an invariant negator no for lexical verbs and a negative suffix -na for auxiliaries.
Tags are formed with the negative tag suffix –n + the personal pronoun in the subject form.
The default imperative has postverbal pronoun retention. Reflexive verbs show both pronoun retention and the object argument.
Like most languages of the world, it lacks relative pronouns, and marks relativisation with an invariant clause marker at.
There is a prolific purposive fir tae'' clause marker.