Talk:Shetland dialect

Grammatical gender

The section about grammatical gender gives no real information at the moment.

How does this grammatical gender manifest itself? Does the declension of nouns depend on gender? (Is there any declension at all?) Does the definite/indefinite article used with nouns depend on gender?

Also, the fragment "Some nouns which are clearly considered neuter in English" is simply nonsense. English does not have grammatical gender (apart from the distinction between he/she/it), so it does not make sense to say that an English noun is neuter. It is not neuter: it simply doesn't possess the grammatical property of gender. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.177.39.34 (talk) 11:19, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

I think it basically means that nouns are referred to as "he" and "she", not much more than that these days.

"English does not have grammatical gender"

No, but it retains some feminine suffixes, and also some things, such as ships can be referred to as "she".--MacRusgail (talk) 16:56, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

MacRusgail, could you please make this clear in the article? This is quite different from the grammatical gender of other Germanic or Latin languages. I know that neither Norwegian, nor Romanian (two Indo-European languages with grammatical gender) refer to objects with the equivalent of he or she, but in both languages the definite/indefinite articles and adjectives must be matched against the gender of the noun. (Well, to be precise, Norwegian has two equivalents of the English it: a neuter and a common gender one.)

So could you please clear up that section? Since you are Scottish, and probably heard Shetlandic being spoken, you are much better qualified to make that edit than me.

Also, could you please give some examples and clarify what you mean by saying that English retains some feminine suffixes? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.177.44.73 (talk) 11:32, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

I've heard it, but I wouldn't like to make too much comment on its grammar, without trying to read up on it, or ask a speaker.--MacRusgail (talk) 14:06, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

shetland

The words listed in Shetland as an exaple is the same as in Norway & Sweeden . I can point to : du,dine,dere,etc.du er,du har,dere har,vi har,nes(peninsula),Skegnes,langnes,(long peninsula).snefjell(snefell). there could more of the same.(jeg)i must wisit the islans in not to distant futhere. i am born Norwegian and speek .No. Sw.Dk. in the No. Scool to learn som Old Norwegian is comulsery. Old Norwegian is no longer spoken in Norway,but it is in daily use in Island. Jan Olav Jan larssen (talk) 21:57, 13 January 2009 (UTC)Jan larssen (talk) 22:17, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Article title

The recent move to Shetlandic dialect is not satisfactory. It certainly begs the question "dialect of what". -- Evertype·✆ 10:59, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

I think it is more accurate than its previous title as a "language", and it seems consistent with entries in categories for e.g Japanese, Korean and Swedish dialects. Arguably it could be Shetlandic Scots - although that might make it sound as if it was about people, or Shetlandic Insular Scots, which is a bit of a mouthful and does not seem to be mentioned in the quoted sources. At least one of them offers Shetland Dialect. I'm not sure what you are suggesting - the relationship to Scots is pretty clear from the lead. Ben MacDui 13:07, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Fortunately, Wikipedia is solidly founded on an official policy called WP:VERIFY. There (ie. out there in the real world) the Institute of Linguists (Great Britain) in 1981 were saying "Jakobsen was of great importance to another West Norse language, Shetlandese, ie the extinct Shetlandic language." So, "Shetlandic language" = Norn, according to the linguist bods. That is definitely not what this article is about!

Meanwhile, the The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Scottish literary journal, Johns Hopkins University's Modern language notes and others talk of the "Shetlandic dialect" as a dialect of the Scots language, which is what this article is about. Cin cin. --Mais oui! (talk) 15:00, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Let's not get unduly attached to "verification" in this instance because the entity in question has many names, distributed over many years, all of which are criticized by some and none of which are preferred by everyone. 1981 was a good while back, to respond to what the Institute of Linguists were saying. Native speakers call it Shetland (or Shaetlan); some dislike the adjective Shetlandic for various reasons, though it is well-formed in Standard English. I have recently wrestled with this question in the Real World, because Im about to publish a 27,000-word novel written in this variety of speech, and we have had to decide what to call it in English. After some discussion we ended up with Shetland Scots which is also well-formed in Standard English (cf New Zealand English, Highland English, Newfoundland English). I have found (and added to the article) a 2009 reference which uses this term; the term is similar in structure to Ulster Scots; it is unambiguous as to its being a dialect of Scots rather than English, and it satisfies the native-speaker preference for Shetland over Shetlandic. In this matter I do not believe that we can settle this by "verifying" quantitatively, as tastes have and are changing. But if the choice is between Shetlandic language or Shetlandic dialect I must favour the former, since the latter is ambiguous. Can we agree on Shetland Scots for this article? (I hope so. I so hate article-name battles.) -- Evertype·✆ 21:17, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Sorry Evertype, I meant to get back to you then clean forgot about it! ;) Just to say that I have no problem with "Shetland Scots", so long as it is supported by reliable ext refs, out there in the big real world. My main objection to "Shetlandic language" is that it is obviously ambiguous, and obviously extremely rarely used in the literature. The only good example of it is clearly a reference to Norn, not the Scots dialect. So, in summary, your page move looks fine to me.--Mais oui! (talk) 15:24, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Use of the ingressive pulmonic?

(Note: cross-posted at Talk:Norn language) Please see:

• Pulmonic ingressive speech in the Shetland Isles: Some observations on a potential Nordic relic feature

Mais oui! (talk) 03:34, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

Examples and references

In the section dealing with orthography there were examples having nothing to do with the orthography being described (in the section on j vs. y and k vs. c there was an example showing how "good", "guid" in scots, is rendered "gjuid" in Shetlandic) and which were "supported" by bare URL references that neither gave evidence of the example in question nor showed the exact reference from which the rule or example derived. I have now removed these as best I could, but the article definitely needs actual references and actual examples that correspond to the actual dialectical orthography and it needs to have this information conveyed in a consistent and well-explained manner that shows the transitions from English letter usage onto Scots and then onto the Shetlandic dialect. And it needs references that connect to either real, published rules for these orthographic changes or that connect to specific examples of them, properly formatted according to templates like "cite book" or "cite journal" or even "cite web", that a reader can track down if they so wish. I am unhappy with the section as it now stands; I was even more unhappy with it as it stood before. A loose necktie (talk) 05:36, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Requested move 18 February 2020

Shetland Scots → Shetland dialect – The name of this article was last discussed in 2012, and the consensus reached was Shetland Scots, a name that, while used by some linguists, is totally unfamiliar to the vast majority of native Shetlanders. I'd like to quote from [this paper], by linguist Viveka Velupillai (which, for full disclosure, I was personally involved with) that, from this Shetlander's perspective, gets the terminology and reasoning behind it exactly right:

The traditional variety spoken on the Shetland Islands has been referred to by different names. The term "Insular Scots" is sometimes used by scholars to indicate the affinities between the varieties spoken on Shetland and on Orkney (see e.g. Johnston 1997; Millar 2007, 2018). The speakers themselves, however, refer to their language as either "Shetland dialect", "Shetland" or "Shetlandic". The latter is controversial and seems to be disliked by most speakers, who tend to prefer the term "Shetland". In this article, I will use the neutral, and by the speakers themselves accepted, term "Shetland dialect" to differentiate between the language and the place.

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment - that the terminology of a handful of linguists should not override the terminology of the thousands speakers of the dialect.

While it appears that more folk to tend to search for terms like "Shetland Scots" and "Shetlandic" here on Wikipedia, I suspect that most of these searches come from those who are generally unaware of the terminology used here, and therefore search statistics should not be taken as gospel for what is most commonly used to refer to it. In person here in Shetland, I have never heard it naturally called Shetland Scots.

A point brought up against a name similar to this previously was that it doesn't address the question, "dialect of what?" In my mind this is not terribly relevant - there is only one Shetland dialect, which is a dialect of Scots, and that will become immediately clear upon reading the first sentence of the article. The only possible point of confusion is the Norn language, which was its own language and has its own name (mostly) sorted out (and there's a "Not to be confused with" link at the top of the article already). There aren't specific dialects of Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian or anything else like that attributed to Shetland. See other articles such as Suzhou dialect - it's not "Suzhou dialect of Chinese", that's not necessary.

The only other criticism I can think of for this name is that very occasionally, some folk in Shetland like to point out that using the term "Shetland dialect" over just "Shetland" implies that it is somehow a lesser variety of speech - while "Shetland" could be considered a language, "dialect" is taken as an insult. While I understand this reasoning, I think it would be needlessly confusing (as said the previous paper quoted) to have both the place and the variety of speech using the same name in this article.

WP:DIALECT advises that "The term dialect should only be used for distinct but mutually intelligible varieties of a language". This is an accurate assessment of Shetland's variety of speech - it is mostly understandable by Orcadians and to a lesser degree Scots speakers on the Mainland.

The proposed title is recognisable, natural, precise enough, concise enough, and most importantly respects the name used by native speakers - which the current name does not. Griceylipper (talk) 00:30, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

• Support, per this ngram. Colin Gerhard (talk) 14:24, 18 February 2020 (UTC)