Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Page 77

Norn
75
There seem to have been a few speakers in Orkney in the mid-1700s,
but probably not for long after that. In Shetland one or two may yet
have been alive around 1800, but the situation described by Low sug-
gests Nom can hardly have been a medium of everyday conversation
in the outlying and isolated island of Foula even in 1774.
5. Traces of Norn in Orkney and Shetland dialect
From the collections and analyses of Jakobsen, Marwick and later
scholars, it is possible to capture something of the Nom substratum in
Orkney and Shetland speech. It should be noted, however, that there
exists as yet no definitive description of the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century dialects of the Northem Isles, nor those of Scotland as a total-
ity, so any account of traces of Norn to be found in Orkney and
Shetland Scots must be somewhat impressionistic.
Claims, often contradictory, have been made about affinities in
intonation between Shetland and Orkney speech and various forms of
Norwegian. In the absence of contrastive studies based on precise
measurements, such assertions have little value.
On the phonological level, it is generally thought that the wide-
spread use in Shetland of /d/ and /t/ for standard English /ð/ and /0/ is
due to the loss of [ð] and [0] in Norn. In Orkney too, it seems that in
both Nom and Scots words original [0] at one time appeared as /t/, but
this is no longer the case. It is further possible that Nom speech habits
underlie the lack of distinction between initial [hw] and [kw] in
Shetland, apparently also a feature of earlier Orcadian speech. Reports
of the existence of long consonants in modem Shetland dialect
(Catford 1957:71-2) remind one of the consonant systems of most
varieties of Scandinavian. The vowel systems of modem Orkney and
Shetland dialects, on the other hand, are Scots. It has been suggested
that Norn speakers with their rich vowel system but relatively small
number of consonant phonemes could more readily imitate the vocal-
ic than the consonant distinctions of Scots (Catford 1957:73). It is
nevertheless widely held that the [o(:)] sounds of modern Northern-
Isles dialects are a Nom relic.