Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Page 116

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Shetland speech today
Celtic place*names have survived into French, German,
English and Scots.
Somewhat later in the 17th century we have various
ecclesiastical documents, mainly minutes of the Presbyterian
Kirk Session, which from their nature are nearer to the
people and their day»to*day life than the records of the
Earl’s courts, but even here the Norse words are sur^
prisingly few, as geo (gjá), scroo (skrúf), pobie (papi),
voir (vár).
Most of the records mentioned above are admittedly
from the central and southern part of Shetland where the
Scots are known to have first settled and undoubtedly the
influence of the English Bible was already beginning to
make itself felt on Shetland speech as it had been doing
on Scots for three generations.
The most likely inference from all this is that in the
central and southern parts of Shetland at least the majority
of the people were bilingual by the 17th century and it is
significant that the last MS. in Norwegian written in Shet*
land (from Unst) is dated 1607, though trading and social
contacts with Norway were still flourishing. It is hardly
possible to overestimate the influence of the Church in the
Scotticising of the speech of the islands. The post*Reforí
mation records show that a great many of the ministers
in Shetland parishes came from Scotland and all of them
would in any case as University graduates be Scots speakers,
and there is a tradition that one Magnus Manson, presum*
ably from his name a Shetlander, who had been appointed
to the Church in Unst, was sent to Norway to learn the
language in order to perform his parochial duties, from
which we infer that the south of Shetland had already
forgotten its old speech while the Northern Isles had not
yet acquired the new. This accords with the fact that the
majority of fragments of Norn rhymes, riddles and the like
and a considerable portion of the material collected by
Jakobsen for his Dictionary came from Unst and the other