Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Qupperneq 117
Shetland speech today
125
North islands, Yell and Fetlar. What seems to have happe=
ned is that the more fertile parts of the mainland and the
richer islands were taken over by Scots settlers and the rest
was left to be possessed in monolingual isolation by the
Norse.
Yet another element in the speech pattern of Shetland
comes into play in the early part of the 17th century when
the Dutch set up herring fishing stations in Bressay and
across the sound the town of Lerwick grew up as a market
for the Hollanders. By 1630, an informant quoted by
Sibbald, who compiled a geographical account of Scotland,
takes note of the language situation: “The Natives . . .
are descended from the Norwegians and speak a Norse
tongue corrupted among themselves, which is now much
worn out . . . Because of their Commerce with the Hob
landers, they promtly speak Low Dutch.« And he conti*
nues, speaking of a northern parish, “All the inhabitants
seldom speak other [than Norwegian] among themselves,
yet all of them speak the Scots tongue more promptly and
more properly than generally they do in Scotland”, this
last suggesting a formal grammatical knowledge of Scots
acquired in the parish schools established by the Kirk.
Incidentally the contribution to the Shetland vocabulary
of “Dutch”, which connotes Low German (from the Hansa
trade with Hamburg and Bremen) as well as the later
Netherlandish, has still to be investigated with the same
thoroughness as Jakobsen studied the Norse element and
indeed in this respect some of Jakobsen’s etymologies may
well have to be revised. Some obvious Dutch words he
records are alikruki, shellfish, bløv, to die (blijven), bugdalin,
packing in a ship’s hold (buikdenning), dolhoit, a stupor
(dolheid), dwars, athwart, frow, gilder, gudling (guilder,
gulden), kloint, a lump (klont), kracht, strength, krank,
ill, krook, jar (kruik), laar, sea boot, leppel, spoon, maat,
friend, mallemok, petrel, pier, seaworm, pram, ship’s boat,
yagger, pedlar (jager).