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Shetland Scots as a new dialect: phonetic and phonological considerations1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2009

REMCO KNOOIHUIZEN
REMCO KNOOIHUIZEN*
Affiliation:
The University of Edinburgh, Linguistics and English Language, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh EH9 1PFremco@ling.ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

The dialect of Scots spoken in the Shetland Islands has been variously described as a language shift variety, acquired when the islanders abandoned their native Norn for Scots from the sixteenth century onwards, or a continuation of the dialects brought to Shetland by Scottish immigrants in the same period. More recently, Millar (2008) discussed the origins of Shetland Scots in a theory of new-dialect formation (Trudgill 2004), which allows for a combination of earlier explanations. In this article, I give a systematic analysis of the phonetics and phonology of Early Shetland Scots in comparison to Norn and mainland Scots dialects. The Shetland Scots data are largely consistent with theoretical expectations, lending further support to the new-dialect reading of the dialect's diachronic development.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , November 2009 , pp. 483 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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