Article 4.3

States should take appropriate measures so that, wherever possible, persons belonging to minorities may have adequate opportunities to learn their mother tongue or to have instruction in their mother tongue.

UN Commission on Human Rights

Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities.

Adopted by General Assembly resolution 47/135 of 18 December 1992

A grammar of Shaetlan

Pre-oil and contemporary

Transcription orthography

for a systematised analysis of the spoken data

Archival and contemporary

Based on the typological principles set out in

SIL FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLeX) 9.0

as well as on the general conventions of the speech community

Viveka Velupillai & Roy Mullay

with thanks to Angus Johnson and Brian Smith for comments and input

It is a fundamental human right to receive schooling in your mother tongue. Yet despite their rich literary tradition, Shetlanders have never been granted this right. On the contrary, the use of Shaetlan was, until recently and without any linguistic justification, not even permitted in schools.

One of the main obstacles for a language to be accepted as a medium of instruction is the lack of a standardised spelling system. We mean to address that potential concern by here providing a linguistically motivated, pragmatic orthography. The basic principle for this transcription system is to orthographically render the phonemes of Shaetlan to the closest equivalent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol, while keeping the orthography meaningful for speakers both in terms of legibility and in terms of keyboard uses. It should be noted that the graphemes to a large extent represent phonemes, i.e. meaning distinguishing sounds, which means that small differences are not captured, but rather the general sound that is commonly understood across the speech community. This mirrors every other orthographic system in the world, where significant sound differences between and within varieties of any given language are left uncoded in the spelling. For example, there are significant differences in the sound of the speech between speakers of Standard English across the UK: the voice of someone from Belfast speaking Standard English differs noticeably from the voice of someone from Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow or Kent speaking Standard English. But the spelling system remains the same. Similarly, the voice of someone from Hamburg speaking Standard German differs considerably from the voice of someone from Köln, Stuttgart, Leipzig or München speaking Standard German. But the spelling remains the same. And this holds for regional accents and voices in every speech community.

The purpose of this transcription system is thus to focus on commonalities rather than differences. In other words, while there will only be one consistent spelling for one word, in real speech that particular word will be uttered differently in different areas, between different speakers and indeed by the same speaker at different points in time. These absolute physical variations will not be captured in a systematised transcription system. Rather, what will be emphasised here is that, despite the fact that a given word will be uttered differently in different regions and by different individuals, it is universally understood across the speech community as that same word. For example, spindrift may be pronounced /spin:drɜft/, /spin:drəft/, /spɪn:drɜft/, /spɪn:drəft/, /spøn:drɜft/, /spøn:drəft/, etc. However, it is universally understood to refer to the word meaning ‘sea spray whipped and blown by heavy winds’ even if not every pronunciation variant is captured in a systematised transcription system. Similarly, in An etymological dictionary of the Norn language in Shetland (Jakob Jakobsen, 1928-32), there will be one entry word in one orthographic spelling (referred to as ‘normalised’ by Jakob Jakobsen), but the actual way it is pronounced across Shetland may vary radically, as indicated by the phonetic transcriptions listed for it. Yet all speakers understand it as meaning the same thing and referring to the same word, such as the single entry sandilu ‘ring-plover’, which lists the following pronunciations (in Jakobson’s own transcription system): [sanˑdilūˑ], [sanˑdiļūˑ], [sānˑdilūˑ], [sanˑdilūgˑ], [sanˑdiļūgˑ], [sānˑdilūgˑ]. The fact that there is both regional and individual variation for each and every word is thus not the task of a systematised transcription system to capture. Rather, the task is to unify in a meaningful way.

It is important to keep in mind that Shetland is a bilingual community. All speakers of Shaetlan are bilingual in Standard English. However, it is also important to keep in mind that while all speakers of Shaetlan have received a minimum of nine years’ formal schooling and training in reading and writing Standard English, they have received virtually no training in reading and writing Shaetlan. It is a mistake to think that literacy is innate: nobody is born with the ability to read and write in their language. All speakers need training in literacy of their own mother tongue, and it is, as mentioned above, a fundamental human right to receive such a training. Swedes receive a minimum of nine years of training in literacy in their own language, as do speakers of German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, etc. The fact that speakers of Shaetlan exclusively receive systematic training in Standard English (and not Shaetlan) will by necessity affect the orthographical (i.e. spelling) intuitions of the community. In other words, the influence of Standard English is highly noticeable in the intuitive community conventions of both published and digitalk material. This is reflected in our suggested transcription system, for example by taking into account the intuitive silent letters – especially the silent es and ws – that reflect the intuitions of a writer trained and well versed in Standard English orthography (see further below).

The principles for this transcription system primarily follow those set out in Grammar and usage of the Shetland dialect (T. A. Robertson & John J. Graham, 1991 [1952]), in combination with the principles set out in the exceptionally well-researched Shetland words (A & A Christie-Johnston with Neil Anderson, 2014), which in turn to a large extent follow the principles set out in An etymological dictionary of the Norn language in Shetland mentioned above. We are also following the current general community practices that can be seen widely emerging in community digitalk. The few modifications that we have done boil down to a consistent system. Thus, while -mogit is consistently pronounced /mɔ:gət/ in John Graham’s Shetland dictionary online, with a long initial vowel, which, according to the principles set out in Grammar and usage of the Shetland dialect, should be followed by a double consonant to indicate this vowel length, it is spelled -moagit in catmoagit but -moget in gulmoget (different initial vowels followed by a single consonant – which according to the principles set out in Grammar and usage of the Shetland dialect would indicate a short vowel – and different end vowels). We have chosen to streamline this to one and the same spelling of ‑mogit. We have also chosen to, as much as possible, streamline several renderings of the same sound into one and the same symbol, while still keeping the transcription meaningful to the current speech community. A third consideration for the choice of transcriptions is, as mentioned, current general conventions, especially as manifested in digitalk. For example, the sound /u/ is variously, but quite consistently, rendered as either u (e.g. du) or oo (e.g. noo); we have therefore chosen to keep this orthographic variation, which shows indications of standing in complementary distribution to each other (the unstressed function words tend to be rendered as u while the stressed as well as the long /u:/ tends to be rendered as oo). As mentioned above, it should be kept in mind that this is a high-contact variety where all speakers have received intense schooling in Standard English. A large proportion of the lexicon overlaps with the English lexicon and tends to retain the English spelling. Furthermore, a fair amount of the community convention is clearly rooted in intimate familiarity with the Standard English orthography, where, for example, the diphthong /aɪ/ is rendered variously as <i> (e.g. wife), <ye> (e.g. bye), <ui> (e.g. quite), etc. We have also chosen to keep this orthographic variation, since it seems widely established, as evidenced through not only published material but also spontaneous digitalk. In other words, the purpose of this system is pragmatic rather than purist.

Here we would like to point out that the tendency to regard Standard English as the norm from which other things deviate is linguistically unjustified, and to regard it as the base form for anything written in Shaetlan is miguided. Standard English historically developed from the Mercian dialect of Old English, while Scots developed from the Northumbrian dialect of Old English. The two languages are thus very closely related, but emerged from two different branches of Old English. This is very similar to Swedish and Norwegian, where the former developed from Eastern Old Norse and the latter from Western Old Norse. Scots is therefore no more a dialect of English than English is a dialect of Scots, just as Swedish is no more a dialect of Norwegian than Norwegian is a dialect of Swedish. For this reason it is thus also unjustified to consider close cognate words as ‘English’ simply because that is the form taught in schools. A word like plaess ‘place’ is a late Latin loan (platea, later in Anglo-Norman plas) into Old English. The Northumbrian forms would have been the forms that Scots inherited, while the Mercian forms would have been the ones inherited in what would become Standard English. It is therefore historically justified to indicate that this is a Scots form rather than an English one, especially since English started dominating in Shetland several centuries after Scots had been established here. In this case a differentiated spelling, which follows the general community intuition, is not only historically justified, but also linguistically so, since the two forms are in fact pronounced with slight differences by bilingual speakers: plaess has a short vowel and a long final consonant (/ple̞s:/) while place has a longer vowel and a short final consonant (/ple̞:s/) (both of which are different from RP and GA /pleɪs/ with a diphthong). An approach that “English words should be spelled the English way” would thus obscure the fact that these kinds of words are no more exclusively English than they are exclusively Scots – it is merely that the Standard English forms are the most familiar ones because Standard English is the socio-politically dominant language and is the language used as the default medium of instruction in schools – as well as the fact that they are not actually pronounced the same way in the bilingual Shetland community.

A successful orthography also helps illustrate the underlying structure of a language. For example, pronunciations will vary according to whether a word is in a stressed position or not, and this is especially true for such function words as pronouns, prepositions, auxiliaries and other semantically bleak words that primarily have a grammatical function in the clause. Thus the verbs can and be, which also function as auxiliaries, are frequently reduced in their pronunciation in various contexts. But to render that as, variously can, cen, caen, cin, cun, cøn, cün, etc would obscure the fact that these forms all boil down to the same functional unit, namely the auxiliary can. Likewise to, for example, have separate spellings for negated forms and tags, such as can ~ caenna ~ cinnen, rather than can ~ canna ~ cannen, would obscure the regularity and predictability of the structure of the language: what we have is not several different forms, but the very regular system of can + the auxiliary negative suffix ‑na and can + the tag negative suffix ‑(e)n. To obscure the structure of a language, especially one that has seen long stigmatisation, risks perpetuating the widespread but mistaken assumption that it is some kind of haphazard idiosyncratic speech and not a structured language that is perfectly viable and valid in its own right. In other words, making the orthography predictable according to the structure of the language helps show that this is a variety with its own viable grammar. This increases the predictability and therefore the teachability of the written form of the language.

In accordance with the internationally widespread convention, sound length (quantity) is indicated with a doubled grapheme. For example, a long vowel is indicated with the vowel grapheme doubled, as in waar /wa:r/, maak /ma:k/, taak /ta:k/. Long or stressed consonants are indicated with a double grapheme, such as in tell /tɛɫ/, bigg /bɪg/, brünnie /bryni/. With the long or stressed velar sound we have chosen the internationally common system of rendering it with <ck>, as in puckle /pɔkɫ/, muckle /mɔkɫ/, back /bak/. As with any transcription system, there are a few exceptions to this, which have established themselves through frequency of use, e.g. <fokk> for /fɔ:k/ (with a long vowel).

We have therefore chosen the following graphemic representations for the sounds of the language, both phonemes and allophones (major and minor phonemes). Notice that the example words are not necessarily Shetland specific, but merely serve to illustrate the relevant sound. Thus, for example, neither pech, bairn nor chuffed are Shetland specific, with pech being a pan-Scots word, bairn being both pan-Scots and pan-Northern English and chuffed being found widely in both Scots and English varieties. Given that Shaetlan is a high contact variety which is also in current close and intense contact with Standard English, a vocabulary of mixed origins is to be expected, and these above mentioned types of words form a stable part of the contemporary vocabulary.

Front rounded vowels

Shaetlan has two front rounded vowels: /y/ and /ø/. They are meaning distinguishing sounds and should be distinguished in spelling. For example, shin is pronounced /ʃɪn/ and means ‘shin (front of lower leg)’ while shün is pronounced /ʃyn/ and means ‘soon’ and shun is pronounced /ʃun/ and means ‘small loch’. Likewise, on is pronounced /ɔn/ and means ‘on’ while øn is pronounced /ø:n/ and means ‘odour, stuffy atmosphere’. To use the spellings <u> and <o> for these sounds would be misleading.

Because the symbol <y> now has come to indicate an /i/-like sound in Shaetlan, through influence from English, it makes sense to use the symbol <ü> for the front rounded vowel /y/. There are two graphemic options available for the front rounded vowel /ø/: either <ø> or <ö>. Both are equally valid and stand in free variation to each other. We feel that this variation should be accepted, much like the variation in spelling of the /ɔr/-ending between the Standard Englishes in the world (-or/-our), as long as each text is internally consistent. We have chosen <ø> because it is the same as the symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is also the same symbol as both Old Norse and Old English used, the two main ultimate ancestors of Shaetlan. Furthermore, it is the symbol for the front rounded vowel used in all the descendants of Western Norse (Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese), and as such neatly captures the linguistic affinity of Shaetlan with the wider North Atlantic cultural area.

The velar plosive (“hard” k-sound)

As mentioned above, we have chosen to spell words with either <k> or <c> for the velar plosive (the “hard” k-sound). The choice rests on the etymology of the word: words that descend from the Scandinavian and Low Germanic area are spelled with <k> (such as krø) while words that descend from Old English, Latin or the Romance area are spelled with <c> (such as caa or corbie). The exception is Latin or Romance words that have an /sk/- or /k/-sound before front vowels (“soft” vowels), where <(s)c> implies a soft sound, as in science and century. Here we have chosen to spell the words with a <k> to indicate that the consonant is hard, as in skül ‘school’ and kerry ‘carry’.

A note on loanwords

In accordance with general international orthographic conventions, loanwords, whether from English or any other language, keep their original spellings. Thus Kensington Gardens, Piccadilly Circus, champaign, rioja, sputnik, tagliatelle, schadenfreude, etc. remain in their original spellings. So do older loans, mainly from Latin and Greek, such as declaration, documentation, variation, psychology, archaeology, etc.

A note on silent letters

As mentioned above, Shetland is a bilingual community formally schooled and trained in Standard English literacy and spelling. The conventions of the Standard English orthography, in many ways antiquated and opaque by now, are therefore deeply rooted in the intuitions of Shaetlan speakers. It is extremely widespread to use silent <e> and <w> characters in the community conventions, for example blyde /blaɪd_/, wrocht /_rɔxt/, writin /_raɪtɪn/, etc. See the sample text below (writin, wrot, happened).

A note on contractions

There is a deeply ingrained intuition to indicate contractions with the apostrophe <’>, which parallels a number of other orthographic conventions internationally (cf., for example, French j’ai ‘I have’ for je ai, Italian c’é ‘there is’ for ci é, German gibt’s ‘there is’ for gibt es, etc). We have chosen to follow this convention to indicate reduced, unemphasised pronunciations with the apostrophe, such as onn’y (for onnly). It should be noted that this is for Shaetlan contractions only, and not situations where the Shaetlan expression is different from English. For example, to write <‘oo’> implies that sounds have been contracted, but that is not the case: the Shaetlan word for ‘wool’ (in Standard English) is oo, so the full word is <oo>. Likewise, the Shaetlan suffix for the present participle is /ən/, spelled -in, which means that a word like winnin does not contain any contractions and should therefore not be spelled with any apostrophe. For the verbal paradigm of be the contractions are as follows:

A note on ‑(o)cht versus –(o)wt

Past tense forms such as bocht, wrocht, tocht etc, was originally for so-called weak verbs with a weak Germanic t-ending. The Old English form bohte (boh-te) reflects the Proto-West-Germanic boh-ta ‘bought’, where the Germanic u-stems regularly get lowered to an o-vowel with a -ta ending (such as worh-ta ‘worked’ from wurkjan ‘to work’). Similarly, the Standard English word daughter and the Scots word dochter go back to the Proto-West-Germanic word *dohter. The Scots forms bocht, wrocht, tocht (< Old English ðohte) and dochter reflect the older pronunciation (/ɑxt/ for ‑ocht) and are attested since the 16th century. The alternative ‑owt ending (as in bowt, towt, dowter) reflects a newer pronunciation /ɜʊt/ influenced by the English varieties after the Great Vowel Shift (ca 1400-1700) and has entered through contact. The Great Vowel Shift started in southern England in the 15th century and gradually spread northwards, but was never an internal change in the Scots varieties.

We propose the original forms with ‑(o)cht as a parallel to the original ‑icht forms (as in licht ‘light’), even if there is a pronunciation variation for them. This would mirror the fairly archaic Standard English ‑ought and ‑ight forms, none of which have the /ʒ/ sound that the <gh> in ‑ought and ‑ight reflect, so that bought is pronounced /bɔːt/ and light is pronounced /laɪt/.

The small d-words

It makes sense for an orthographic system to differentiate between different function words, i.e. those kinds of words that in themselves do not carry much semantic meaning but rather just have grammatical functions in the sentence. For example, they’re, their, and there are all pronounced in the same way. But to have one single form for them would obscure their grammatical functions; a sentence in Standard English like There over there lifting there potatoes is nearly impossible to comprehend. The different forms in fact not only give a clue to the different etymologies of the words, but also to their functions. To that effect we have chosen to differentiate between the definite article da ‘the’, the locative adverbial dere ‘there’, the third person plural dey ‘they’, the third person plural possessive pronoun dir ‘their’, the contracted form for the third person plural + BE d’ir ‘they’re’, the existential dummy de, and the present tense existential form de’r ‘there is’ based on the following.[9] To have different forms that are simply used randomly would be even more irrational; something like Their over they’re lifting there potatoes makes no sense at all. Speakers of English all over the world are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the different Standard English forms the/there/their/they’re/there’s/they according to their functions, especially when given schooling. It would be quite unreasonable to not assume the same capability for Shaetlan speakers.

[9] The existential ‘there is’ is commonly spelled <der> by contact induced analogy to the English there, especially in modal constructions such as in Der canna be ony left for ‘There can’t be any left’, which shows a complete analogy with the Standard English existential expression. This also potentially confuses it with dey ir and dere (see footnote above), which is again why we opt for differentiation.

The building blocks of words

Shaetlan has a systematic set of derivational affixes, that is, building blocks that attach to words in order to form new words, as well as inflectional affixes, that is, building blocks that attach to words to specify some grammatical information. It makes sense for an orthographic system to differentiate between these building blocks in a meaningful way. For example, the following two affixes create new words:

‑een: makes nouns out of verbs, e.g. biggeen ‘structure’ (from bigg ‘to build’ + ‑een ‘nominalizer’);

‑lins: makes adjectives or adverbs out of nouns or verbs, e.g. backlins ‘backwards’ (back + ‑lins ‘adverbializer’)

and the following affix provides grammatical information:

‑in: marks a verb for the progressive aspect or the present participle (e.g. bigg-in ‘[to be] building’)

These three affixes derive from different sources, and have never been pronounced the same way in Scots: the nominalizer ‑een derives from Old English ‑ing/‑ung, and has in Shaetlan retained its high fronted pronunciation /in/ and fronted its velar nasal /ŋ/ to the alveolar /n/; the present participle/progressive marker ‑in derives from Old English ‑ende (< Proto-Germanic ‑*andz), and has in Shaetlan retained its weakened central pronunciation /ən/ with an alveolar /n/ (the velar nasal /ŋ/ Southern English hypercorrect merging with the OE ‑ing/‑ung form); the adverbializer/adjectivizer ‑lins derives from Old English ‑ling(a)/‑lung(a) (< Proto-Germanic *liŋg‑/laŋg‑/luŋg‑ ‘to extend, reach’) + Old English ‑es ‘adverbializer’ (< Proto-Germanic *‑as/*-is). It therefore makes sense to differentiate these affixes orthographically.

A note on -ly versus -li

There are two origins to the -ly/-li endings: Old English -líc and Old English -líce. By the 15th century both forms had got reduced to -li/-ly (probably due to influence from Old Norse). This means that both forms are equally justified, a bit like the verbal endings -ize or -ise which have been equally acceptable in British English since the 16th century – Oxford University Press traditionally used -ize spellings on both phonetic and etymological grounds (-ize is closer to the original Greek -izo).

We propose to allow for the -ly/-li variation in spelling in Shaetlan, making e.g. laekli and laekly equally acceptable, as long as the choice is consistent within the same text.

The personal pronouns