Dunna!

In Shaetlan there are two ways of forming negative sentences. In sentences with auxiliary verbs, also called function verbs (ie verbs that don't have much meaning in themselves but which accompany another, lexical verb) the negator is the morphological verbal suffix -na: I dunna/didna see him, du sallna/sudna spaek, he willna/widna come, we irna/wirna hungry. This is different from Standard English, where the negator (not) is the same for both auxiliary verbs and lexical verbs, but can contract to n't with auxiliaries. More about the other Shetland dialect negator in our next post!