Fishing for words: the taboo language of Shetland fishermen and the dating of Norn language death¹

Abstract

There has been considerable debate about when Norn, the Scandinavian language formerly spoken in Orkney and Shetland, died as a community language in the islands. Arguments thus far have focused primarily on second‐hand commentary from travel and census reports, sparking disputes about the credibility of these sources. Linguistic evidence, although very little survives, is seldom used systematically in the debate about when Norn died. I argue that a list of thirty Norn words collected in 1774 can tell us about the state of the language at the time, and can thus be used as evidence in this debate.1

Language contact in Shetland Scots and Southern Irish English

“…Shetland fishermen and seafarers, like many other nautical cultures, had a set of words known as 'haaf' words that would not be spoken at sea for fear of bringing bad luck upon those on board the vessel (Knooihuizen, 2008: 106-7). The second study was conducted by Jakobsen, who collected a large number of Norn words that still existed in Shetland Scots in 1893 (Knooihuizen, 2008). Jakobsen (1897: 10) notes that '.…”

“…During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was probably a high degree of bilingualism between Scots and Norn in Shetland (Barnes, 1984). Norn was essentially moribund there by the beginning of the nineteenth century (by rough consensus) (Knooihuizen, 2008: 102). However, its influence on Scots, which became the only commonly spoken language in Shetland (Barnes, 1984), could still be seen during this period of waning, primarily in the form of lexical borrowing (Millar, 2008: 253).…”

“…The first study discussed here was conducted in 1774 by Low, whose goal was to collect Norn loanwords from speakers of Shetland Scots (Low, 1879). Table 1 contains a small sample, consolidated in Knooihuizen (2008). It should be noted that, because Low apparently collected these words while at sea, the words his speakers produced were likely restricted to the group of ‘noa’, or non-taboo, words.…”

Language shift and apparent standardisation in Early Modern English

“…When Norn became extinct as a common vernacular in the islands is a much more contentious issue, though. Some hold that the language continued to be used until the nineteenth century, and without much contact influence from Scots at that (Rendboe 1984;Wiggen 2002), but the majority consensus -based on, in my opinion, the most reliable evidence -is that Norn ceased to be natively acquired not much after 1700, and that there were no more speakers of the language by the third or fourth quarter of the eighteenth century (Barnes 1998;Knooihuizen 2008). …”

Auregnais: Insular Norman's Invisible Relative

“…Moreover, since the text is not a remembered one, such as a piece of poetry (cf. Knooihuizen : 103) and over four decades had passed since Le Maistre claimed to have last heard Auregnais, the authenticity of the recording as a piece of linguistic data cannot be fully relied upon. For example, it contains some discrepancies in relation to the forms elicited from native speakers of Auregnais in the early twentieth century: prêchyi ‘to speak’ (cf.…”