Comparing Shaetlan, Swedish and English grammar
Regarding the claim that the grammar of Shaetlan is "mainly English" we have now added Swedish to our database of grammatical features (see our post on 14 Dec 2022 for details). There are two reasons for this: (1) the more data we get, the more we discover features in Shaetlan that have been hiding in plain sight; (2) Swedish is as closely related to Shaetlan as Standard English is. The ancestors of Shaetlan are Scots (not Standard English) + Norn (not Swedish) + Dutch/Low German. Scots is not and never was a dialect of English any more than English is or was a dialect of Scots: they come from two different branches of Old English. And Norn never was a dialect of Swedish anymore than Swedish is or was a dialect of Norn: they come from two different branches of Old Norse. So the genetic distance between these three languages is roughly the same.
We used the hclust function in R to plot a Cluster Dendrogram, where the algorithm clusters data based on how similar or dissimilar they are. The branches and boxes show that Shaetlan and Swedish cluster together while Standard English sits on its own. So the algorithm says that based on this dataset, Shaetlan and Swedish are grammatically more similar to each other than either of them is to Standard English. We doubt very much that anyone would take it into their head to argue that Shaetlan is a "dialect" of Swedish. This Cluster Dendrogram shows that it is even less justified to describe Shaetlan as a "dialect" of Standard English.
PS: R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It is used by most researchers from all sorts of disciplines to analyse and display data.
References
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey N. Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finnegan. 2021. Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals.info.
R Core Team (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Available at https://www.R-project.org/.
Rara & Universals Archive. Das grammatische Raritätenkabinett & The Universals Archive. Available at https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/.
Teleman, Ulf, Staffan Hellberg, Erik Anderson. 1999. Svenska Akademiens grammatik. Stockholm: Svenska Akademien. Available at: https://svenska.se/grammatik/.
Velupillai, Viveka. 2012. An Introduction to Linguistic Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Velupillai, Viveka & Roy Mullay. 2022. Shaetlan. A Primer. Available at: https://www.iheardee.com/shaetlan/shaetlan-grammar-dictionary.
