Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Qupperneq 75

Norn
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It has thus become harder to see the death of Nom as the result of the
imposition on the Northern Isles of an alien culture. Society changed
of course, but so it did everywhere.
The fundamental factor underlying the language shift, as indicated
at the outset, is probably nothing more exotic than the proximity of
Orkney and Shetland to Scotland. It is this which led to entanglements
on the mainland from the earliest days of the Orkney earldom; which
encouraged people ífom the mainland to involve themselves in
Northern-Isles affairs and to settle there in increasing numbers; which
made it natural for King Christian I to pawn the islands to King James
III. As long as Orcadians and Shetlanders maintained links with
Norway, of course, there was some incentive for them to retain their
inherited form of Scandinavian speech, albeit it doubtless came to dif-
fer more and more from most kinds of Norwegian. But as links with
Norway started to dry up — in the 1500s in Orkney and afiter c. 1600
in Shetland — and the attention of the islanders came to be directed
almost exclusively towards Scotland, the basis for the maintenance of
Nom was no longer there.
The mechanics of the language shift are even harder to establish
than the causes underlying it. If Nom was still the common language
in Orkney and Shetland at the beginning of the 1500s, notwithstand-
ing many or most will have been bilingual to a degree, by what process
had it become virtually extinct some 250 years later? Here we can only
speculate. Once regular contact with Norway had gone, we may con-
ceive that many bilingual parents decided to speak Scots to their chil-
dren rather than a low-prestige vernacular with no official status or
written form. The literary testimony, however, does not suggest the
total abandonment of Norn in the course of a couple of generations,
but that it was given up sooner in some places than others. Isolation,
geographical or cultural, can be a factor promoting language retention.
Geographical isolation, or at least distance, may explain references to
Norn’s being retained longer in the more northerly isles of Shetland.
But that can hardly be the reason for its survival in Harray on the
Orkney Mainland. Thomson (2001:314) describes Harray in the sec-
ond half of the seventeenth century as “the udal heartland of Orkney”,