Some months ago I published a piece on Scotland’s severed tongues, Pictish and Cumbric, languages which used to be spoken in Scotland but which became extinct centuries ago.
Nevertheless, these lost languages remain an important part of the linguistic heritage and history of Scotland. However there is yet another extinct language which used to be spoken in Scotland, which became extinct at the dawn of the modern era, and whose remains are more substantial than the meagre remnants of Cumbric or Pictish. This is the Norn language, the Norse language of Orkney and Shetland, which was also once spoken in the north of Caithness, and also in the Gaelic milieu of the Western Isles – although here it is not usually referred to as Norn, but simply as Norse.
Norse was introduced into Scotland during the Viking invasions which began in the early 800s. Prior to this, Orkney and Shetland had been inhabited by a Celtic speaking population whose language appears to have been Pictish. This population was completely absorbed and replaced by the Norse incomers leaving very little linguistic traces. Old Irish texts preserve the name Innse Cat “the cat islands” for Shetland, which is likely to be a Gaelic form of the islands’ original Pictish name. The oldest known version of the modern name Shetland is Hetland; this may represent “Catland” with a Norse corruption of the Pictish tribal name. By the 1500s the islands were being referred to in Norse sources as Hjaltland. In older Scots Hjaltland became Ȝetland. The initial letter is the Middle Scots letter, yogh, the pronunciation of which is almost identical to the original Norn sound, /hj/. When the use of the letter yogh was discontinued, it was often replaced by the similar-looking letter z (which at the time was usually rendered with a curled tail: ⟨ʒ⟩ hence Zetland, the form used in the name of the pre-1975 county council. This is the source of the ZE postcode used for Shetland. The hj, pronounced like h followed by a y sound as in human or huge, eventually became corrupted into sh.
The same Pictish tribal name lies behind the name Caithness, which was formed by suffixing the Norse word ness – headland – to the Pictish tribal name. Orkney’s name is a Norse adaptation of the islands’ original Celtic name, Arcaibh in modern Gaelic. Speakers of Old Irish referred to the islands as Innse Orc “islands of the young pigs”
The Shetland islands of Yell, Unst, and Fetlar have names which seem to be pre-Norse in origin, but apart from these traces the place names of Shetland and Orkney have been almost completely replaced by Norse names. The same holds true for Caithness north and east of a line drawn roughly from Lybster to west of Thurso, however it seems that up until the 1500s this area of Caithness was inhabited by a bilingual Gaelic-Norse population.
Following the Norse settlement, Old Norse became the language of every stratum of society in Orkney and Shetland and would remain so for a thousand years. Old Norse is abundantly attested. One of the Norse sagas the Orkneyinga saga, is a narrative of the history of the Orkney and Shetland islands and their relationship with Norway and Scotland. The saga was written in the late12th century but comes down to us in a 13th century copy written in Iceland. At this time there was no significant difference between the Norse language of Orkney and Shetland, or the Faroes for that matter, and that of Iceland. The Orkneyinga saga tells of the lives and deeds of the Norse jarls who ruled the islands between the 9th and 13th centuries. The saga as it comes down to us is written in contemporary Old Icelandic.
As the centuries passed, the islanders continued to speak their Norse tongue but gradually their language began to evolve along lines of its own. This process was accelerated when Orkney and Shetland became a part of Scotland in 1472, however Scottish influence was strong even before this, in 1379 the Scottish earl Henry Sinclair took control of Orkney on behalf of the Norwegian king Håkon VI Magnusson. Norway was severely weakened by the Black Death in the 1300s and Norway and all its possessions, including Orkney, Shetland, Faroe, Iceland, and Greenland passed under the control of the Danish crown.
Being a Germanic language closely related to Norse, Scots began to exert an influence on the Norse speech of the islands. The complex noun case system of Old Norse began to decay, as it also did in Norwegian and Danish.
The Norse speech of the islands came under increasing influence from Scots as Scots speakers from mainland Scotland moved to the islands following their absorption into Scotland. The language became known as Norn, from the Old Norse word norrǿnn ‘northern’. It was rarely written down, the main literary languages of the islands being Danish or, increasingly, Scots. The last document written in Danish was produced in Shetland in 1670.
By the 1500s Norn had died out in Caithness and would soon come under pressure in Orkney and Shetland. In 1582, George Buchanan, in his “History of Scotland wrote “the old Gothic tongue (vetus gothica longua) was still used in Orkney.” But the language was already under pressure.
One report from from 1670 states that there are “only three or four parishes” in Orkney where people speak “Noords or rude Danish” and that they do so “chiefly when they are at their own houses, but all speak the Scots language.” . It is believed that Norn died out in Orkney by the end of the 18th century. In 1750 Murdoch Mackenzie wrote: “The Language is English in the Scotch Dialect, with more of the Norwegian than any other Accent; these Islands having formerly been a Province of Norway, of which they still retain some of the Customs, and a little of the Language, which they call Noren, much the same with what is presently spoken in Iceland and the Faro Islands. Thirty or Forty years ago this (Norn) was the language of two parishes in Pomona Island; since which, by the Means of Charity-Schools, it is so much wore out, as to be understood by none by old People; and in thirty years more, it is probably, will not be understood there at all’.
The language survived somewhat better in Shetland. Another report from 1701 indicates that there were still a few “Norse” speakers in Orkney who were capable of speaking “no other thing”, and notes that there were more speakers of the language in Shetland than in Orkney.
Some reports indicate that by 1703 Scots was already widespread in Shetland, but Norn continued to be spoken for a few generations more.
In 1894 the Faroese linguist and scholar Jakob Jakobsen, who researched a dictionary of the many Norn words which survived in the Shetland dialect of Scots wrote: 1894, Jakob Jakobsen: “Even in 1600 the knowledge of English seems to have been very meagre in Shetland; for, according to the “Fasti Ecclesiæ Scotticanæ”, Magnus, surnamed “Norsk”, minister of Unst (the most northerly of the Islands), made a voyage to Norway to learn the language spoken there, because his congregation did not undersand any other language than Norse.
“The Shetland Norn was still a living language in the middle of the 18th century even rather late in the 18th century, Norn songs and ballads survived in the mouths of the common people. In several parts of Shetland, especially Foula and the North Isles, the present generation of old people remember their grandparents speaking a language they could hardly understand, and which was called Norn or Norse. As late as 1894, there were people in Foula who could repeat sentences in Norn, as I myself had the opportunity of hearing. The last man in Unst who is said to have been able to speak Norn, Walter Sutherland from Skaw, died about 1850. In Foula, on the other hand, men who were living very much later than the middle of the present century are said to have been able to speak Norn’.”
Norn survives in a handful of short texts collected before the language died out. The longest and most important of these is a traditional poem called the Hildina ballad. The ballad was recorded on Foula in 1774 from an old farmer called William Henry. Henry was not a fluent speaker of Norn but had memorised 35 stanzas of the ballad as a child.
For example this is the Lord’s Prayer in Shetland Norn, recorded in the 1770s
Fy vor or er i Chimeri. / Halaght vara nam dit.
La Konungdum din cumma. / La vill din vera guerde
i vrildin sindaeri chimeri. / Gav vus dagh u dagloght brau.
Forgive sindorwara / sin vi forgiva gem ao sinda gainst wus.
Lia wus ik? o vera tempa, / but delivra wus fro adlu idlu.
For do i ir Kongungdum, u puri, u glori, Amen
An important source of Norn material is the Etymological dictionary of the Norn language of Shetland by Jakob Jakobsen, published in 1928. This dictionary lists Norn words which have survived in Shetland Scots and which give that variety of Scots its distinctive character.
The dictionary is available online here
https://archive.org/details/anetymodictofthenornlanginshet/01%20An%20Etymological%20Dictionary%20of%20the%20Norn%20Language%20in%20Shetland%20Part%20I/
There has been an attempt to revive Norn, called Nynorn ‘New Norn’, not to be confused with Nynorsk, which is one of the two standard varieties of the modern Norwegian language.
Details about Nynorn, and other information about the overlooked Norn language which is an important symbol of Scotland’s cultural and historic links to Scandinavia, can be found here
https://nornlanguage.x10.mx/index.php?intro
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