Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Page 51

MICHAEL BARNES
Norn
the one-time Scandinavian language
of Orkney and Shetland
1. Introduction
This paper outlines the history of the one-time Scandinavian language
of Orkney and Shetland oflten referred to as Norn. Section 2 gives a
general historical background, section 3 describes the available
sources of Norn, section 4 is a discussion of the life and death of the
language and the possible reasons for its demise, section 5 reviews
possible traces of Nom in the Scots dialects of Orkney and Shetland
and section 6 contains a brief summary.
2. Historical background
2.1 Scandinavian linguistic expansion in the Viking Age
Around AD 700 the Northern branch of Germanic, or Scandinavian as
it came to be known, was spoken over an area comprising roughly pre-
sent-day Denmark and southern and central Norway and Sweden.
During the Viking and early Middle Ages this type of language was
exported to many other parts of northem Europe. Scandinavian-speak-
ing communities established themselves in the Faroes, Iceland,
Greenland, certain areas of what later became Russia, the Finnish and
Estonian coastal regions, Normandy and, not least, the British Isles.
Only in a few of these places did Scandinavian survive for any length
of time. In the Faroes and Iceland, which were effectively uninhabited
at the time of settlement, it became the sole language. In Greenland
the incomers appear to have lived a self-contained existence until the
puzzling extinction of the colony at the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury. The Scandinavian of Finland and Estonia (the latter probably to
íslenskt mál 26 (2004), 49-81. © 2005 íslenska málfrœðifélagið, Reykjavík.