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The earlier Norse Language faded slowly, taking at least as long as three hundred years to die out in certain isolated parts of the archipelago such as Foula and Unst , as first Lowland Scots and then English became the language of power. Yet the Norn even influences the kind of Lowland Scots spoken here today, in lexicon. This unique mix has come to be termed Shetlandic . Little remains of the old Norse tongue, Norn in written form, and what is extant is often corrupt, though the fragments are fascinating. Those have been studied in depth, and scholars have notionally fixed the old Shetlandic Norn as kin to Faeroese . In the British era, which properly began for Shetland with the Napoleonic Wars, Shetlanders have developed a literature in variant written forms of the spoken Shetlandic tongue, as well as in English - the first widely published writers were two daughters of the Lerwick gentry, Dorothea Primrose Campbell and Margaret Chalmers writing for the most part in a rather formal English. Subsequent Shetlandic writers such as James Stout Angus , George Stewart and Basil R Anderson helped forge the written form of the native tongue. There are now a number of titles that might properly be termed ‘Shetlandic' or 'Shetland' classics, in the sense that they found a ready market among Shetlanders when first published and became, in time, somehow definitive of some part of the islands' culture. These works are not always the works of natives - 'incomers' and 'blow-bys' have made considerable contributions, as in the cases of Jakob Jakobsen and Hugh MacDiarmid for instance, to literature about Shetland. It is a sad fact that much of this literature is currently out of print and has been, in some instances, for a very long time. As a result, subsequent generations of Shetlanders have grown up unaware of this tradition – and specialist readers, the scholars beyond the islands who might be interested, remain oblivious to the work. |
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