Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Síða 70

68
Michael Barnes
Even though the chance of preservation may have skewed the pic-
ture somewhat, it seems justified to conclude from this overview that
the language of public discourse in the Northem Isles changed from
Scandinavian to Scots in the course of the fifteenth century. The shift
appears to have occurred later in Shetland than Orkney, and perhaps
more slowly, but by the 1500s Scots is clearly the natural written
medium everywhere. The four sixteenth-century Scandinavian-lan-
guage documents from Shetland appear as a relic when contrasted
with the wealth of material in Scots (cf. Ballantyne and Smith 1994,
1999).
Epistolary activity, of course, tells us little about speech. People
buying, selling and bequeathing land, settling disputes, making pay-
ments, complaining about the abusing of their rights, etc., may have
done so in Scots as the recognised language of public affairs, while
speaking a form of Scandinavian in most of their day-to-day activities.
Alternatively, it could be that the initiators of documents were in the
main Scots speakers, while Scandinavian remained the idiom of less
affluent sections of the population. Whatever the circumstances, there
seems certain to have been a fair spread of bilingualism, but we are
very much in the dark about the forms it took. In the fourteenth cen-
tury most people probably spoke a local kind of Scandinavian most of
the time. Nevertheless, there were clearly a number of Scots speakers
in the islands, including, after 1379, the Earl of Orkney himself. By
the fifteenth century, if not before, many native speakers of
Scandinavian must have found it in their interest to learn at least a
smattering of Scots, and in the sixteenth most will at the very least
have known enough to deal with the authorities, take part in church
services, etc.
There are several indications that knowledge of Scots was wide-
spread in the sixteenth century. For one thing, there is no mention at
any point of language difficulties in the islands. Some have taken the
reference to “Magnus norsk” as such, a minister in the Shetland island
of Unst in the 1590s, who is said to have earned the nickname because
he went to Norway “to leam the Norse language in order to qualify
himself for preaching to the Zetlanders, who at this time understood