How I learned to love the rich language of Shetland's dialect

Ever since I met my wife, I have been in love with the interwoven strands of her homeland’s culture. Shetland is not fully Norse, yet not recognisably Scottish, and the vestiges of Britishness are even fainter to discern. The writer Cal Flynn’s description of Orkney holds true here, too; it is a country within a country within a country. 

On my first visit, I lost a few enjoyable hours in the Shetland Times bookshop, where I picked up The Shetland Dictionary by John J Graham, a 1970s work that marked the first large-scale study of the Shetland dialect since Jakob Jakobsen's etymological account more than half a century previously. Many of its words were already used in my household, from shilpit, meaning sour, to peerie and muckle, meaning small and big respectively. But Graham’s work truly opened my ears to a dialect that fuses Norn, Old Scots, German, and even traces of Latin. 

What stood out most were the soond wirds – ‘crexin and ‘hostin’, for example, describe the sound of clearing the throat, while ‘gurblottit’ describes badly washed clothes – and those terms so specific that they spoke of the way of life on Shetland: ‘grötti’, meaning a thick, liquid mess, is inspired by the oil from fish livers stored in barrels. Such words may seem inconsequential, but cumulatively, they helped a soothmoother better understand the place and its folk.

A love letter to the islands

I am not the only one to have experienced this epiphany. While back in Shetland this summer, I came across the perfect complement to Graham’s tome – Storm Pegs, a beautiful memoir by the poet, Jen Hadfield, who has called the archipelago home since 2006. Her book is a love letter to the islands, and celebrates how words anchor its sense of place.

By her own admission, Hadfield was mired in a creative trough when she met Neil Thomson. His day job is the skipper of the Good Shepherd IV, the ferry that traverses the torrid waters between Grutness and Fair Isle, but he is also a musician of redoubtable talent, and a proud custodian of his home island’s history. 

Thomson gifted her ‘From A to P’, an old, incomplete record of Fair Isle words with phonetics, based on a hardbound notebook recovered from one of the isle’s crofts in the early 1980s. The identity of the pamphlet’s author has been lost to time, but to Hadfield, its words opened up “a brand new spectrum of colours”.

Traces of inferiority

As she points out, for all that the torchbearers of Shetland’s culture – in particular those who produce literature and music – have strived to ensure ‘da language o da hert’ proliferates through the generations, their efforts have often been undermined. To this day, there are teachers who encourage the language to flourish. So too, there are some who correct those pupils who deign to ‘spaek Shaetlan’ in school. 

The same tensions apply to other dialects, like Doric, and it may be that those traces of shame and inferiority, the legacy of church and state, never quite vanish. Happily, there are ample champions around to ensure that such emotions remain in the minority. Languages have always served as both bridges and barriers, and in a place where the sea informs everything, Shaetlan’s connections are felt far and wide.