I'm from Shetland too but definitely from the younger generation! I live doon sooth now but I still understand all the dialect my grandparents talk in. I never knew about pronouncing the k though, I haven't heard them use that (born in the 30s). The words I really worry about are the farming words, though maybe they'll stay in use in the more rural areas of Shetland.

I've stumbled across some full on Norski sounding Shetlanders here in Aberdeen. But our own dialect is dying a death

We are very fond of wir Icelandic cousins. Greetings!

Takk du skrift det ,Kan þú Bjarn skilja og les dessa Hja l t-landi tale godan jæja i

That sounds like a fairly untypical person. It is surely not Icelandic but it is Norse ( which of course is similar to Icelandic )

The most famous quote from the Trondheim Frostathing Law is _"at lögum skal land várt byggja en eigi at ulögum øyða"_ (with law shall our land be built, and not by lawlessness desolated). Originally, law existed only in oral form, recited at meetings of the Thing. So it's impossible to say how this quote has moved around. But it is known from many parts of the Norse area.

@@ramadamming8498 If you feel better calling it Norse, -its ok to me.

@@magnusjensson8199 I am a total layman in the matter ! I guess industrialisation rapidly disconnected the language also - though apparently, Shetlanders are the closest genetically to the Proto Norse speakers ( apart from some pockets of Denmark apparently ) as they had no real change in lineage and genetics, apart from in the 17/1800s, with Scots that bought some Anglo and Gael genetics. Previously, Shetland had no Gael genetics at all, unlike the Faroes and Iceland ( and areas of Norway high in Gaelic ancestry ).

"mæt logh scal land byggæs" is the beginning of the first sentence of intro to "Jyske lov" 1241. The text on the police car seems to have its origins here, however in a more archaic language dress.

My McLeod grandparents spoke a weird mix of Norse words and Scots Gaelic ( edited to reflect the influence in the Hebrides )

Norn was the Scandinavian language of Shetland and Orkney. It lasted on Foula the longest, into the mid 19th century. Shetlandic today refers to the island Scots dialect of Shetland that was influenced by the Norn language as it was displaced by Scots.

@Danny Ryan we still use the phrase " I ken " and if'n ya ken" and " if'n you're a ken to" deep in Appalachia where I grew up ... many put it off to the dialect but we have always been. Of the mind it came from kernings and was held over from the Norse influence on clans like McLeod of Lewis that carried to the new world... I use it every day to denote " I see what you're saying " in the case of " I ken" and " if'n you're a ken to" to mean " if you've got that mindset before you " and 95% of the Mountain and deep South people understand me ..

@@PLHofPKHDHow did they speak a mix of Gaelic and Norn if Gaelic was never a part of the Shetland linguistic history? Sounds fishy to me…

@Pauliepoika my apologies I thought they were referring to the Norse Gael culture that was prevalent and dominant throughout the Hebrides specifically the Isle of Lewis and village of Stornoway...were my McLeod grandparents alive today I would have them do some recordings ...alas they are not... my Mistake appreciate you pointing out that which was " rotten in the state of Denmark " 🇩🇰 🤔

Weelks, wind and Weevles, Jack Edwardson

@@jimratter5561 Even now knowing that it's Weelks and not Wilkes, it still looks hard to actually find. It's not really showing up for me in the U.S.

Unfortunately, that's not how power imbalance, privilege, and historical oppression work. But hopefully it will be possible once the language is no longer stigmatized.

It's probably worth pointing out too that the Norse only settled Shetland after nearly 5000 years of previous occupation by at least 2 previous cultures, so singling out the English as colonisers is Shetlanders awarding themselves some special precedence which they simply don't have.

LoL.... the American Misunderstanding of Scots-Irish or "Scotch-Irish" is rampant but steadily being corrected ... Appalachia is very different from West Virginian on down to Georgia

Appalachians have appropriated the name from the Appalachicola tribe who originally lived in that area. non-Native settlers aren't Indigenous although they've been living there for a few hundred years. The Native tribes were there for thousands and thousands of years since the last Ice Age

Yeah I speak West Riding dialect and there are a lot of similarities, with Shetlandic they seem to dance around it being just a dialect of Scots with a Norn substrate probably because of the sociological perception of it as different from lowland speech. The comment that it's some kind of mixed language is just flat out wrong. I follow the group they're apart of "iheardee" and they even comment on how the gender system is like the ones you see in other Germanic languages when really it isn't. I think she knows all of this but wants to present an image of what Shetlandic is for a non-linguistic reason For a comparison of West Riding speech and Shetlandic, I'll translate the caption at 0:41 "Roy Mullay is a native speiker o Shetlandic wi a keean interest i linguistics an a backgrun/backgraand i game proagrammin. He's med Jakob Jakobsen's Etymological Dictionary o t'Norn language i Shetlandic available on t'tinternet archive."

@@Fenditokesdialect Surely Sheatlan has lost its indefinate article because in the Scandinavian languages it would be at the end of the word, not the beginning.

@@trondranorquoy5154 in Shetlandic the article works as in other dialects of Scots, as in "da" as in the sentence "A ging til da posst office" that was mentioned in the video. I suspect you're confusing my dialect with Shetlandic which it isn't but for the sake of clearing it up; in many dialects of the Midlands and Northern England the definite article is a clitic that is attached to surrounding words. So the same sentence above would be "Aw go to t'pooast office"

@@Fenditokesdialect Hi James, no I'm not confusing the two dialects as I'm from Shetland! I'm just pondering on Norn and the dialect Shealtan, and I suspect the distinction between the two is not particularly helpful and a bit artificial. Norn definitely had the definite article at the end of the word and distinguished between feminine, masculine and neuter nouns, Shaetlan clearly does not but still has remnants of the distinction.

@@trondranorquoy5154 Shetlandic is just a Scots dialect with a Norn substrate, so is Orcadian though to a lesser extent. They're vastly different languages despite being both Germanic. It's true that the last speakers of Norn in Shetland and Orkney had some very heavy Scots influenced speech, such as incorporating Scots articles (and not using the native suffixed ones), present participles and tons of vocabulary (just look at the Lord's prayer in Norn). To claim that Shetlandic is not one of the many different dialects that make up Scots and rather some mixed language which incorporates Scots as one of its parent languages is beyond false linguistically and I suspect the reason this is being done by these language promoters is for identity reasons (since as they say most people don't *see* themselves as speaking Scots) and also likely to garner more localised support for the language. Obviously that doesn't mean I don't support efforts for Shetlandic's revitalisation, I think what they're doing is great, but all this misleading information about what Shetlandic is exactly is just not alright from a linguist's perspective. Now language planners do this a lot, but in this case what makes it especially bad is we have a qualified linguist doing it, and the likelihood is she knows what she's saying isn't correct but does it anyway, which just isn't right as a researcher. Furthermore it's simply not necessary, dialects of one regional language can still be individually promoted, it happened for the Romansh language in Switzerland for example, and as far as I know it hasn't been making any issues.

Seconded! Heri should definitely be involved

I would welcome that. Especially the phonological changes from Old West Norse to Faroese are certainly worth an interesting discussion. Notably the skerping phenomenon or the sound change of dental fricatives, especially the phenomenon that an approximant is often inserted between vowels where there was once a dental fricative. And furthermore, the influence of Danish in spoken and written language is certainly worth a conversation. I would be happy if there was a video on Faroese!

I think all three genders still exists in the Swedish dialect in Österbotten (Finland). So what she said could still be true.

When thinking about it boats is always female in Swedish, not the word but the actual boats. So they are refered to as hon.

@@lubricustheslippery5028 yeah, but i think thats some european thing from latin since "the boat" in swedish is "båten" the "en" at the end shows that it's a male and for example "klockan (the clock)" ends with an "an" makes it a hon/female. I also speak a bit of icelandic and thats how I think when addressing nouns, btw in icelandic you would say "báturinn, hann flaug (the boat, it flew)" and "klukkan, hún flaug (the clock, it flew)". hope my explanations are understandable

To some extent this is true in a lot of more rural sweden when people speak dialect. I specifically come to think about animals, if someone talks about foxes, bear, crows, wolves, dogs and such some people use he/she. The clock is always a she as you said, some older people can ask "what is she" and it is understand "she" refers to the time/clock. I'm from Västergötland so quite far from norrland...

All three genders exist in norwegians accents. We speak about cars and boats as a she (an example).

They speak Gaelic and if English, with a Hebridean Scots dialect, primarily on Barra although I wouldn't be surprised if there are Nordicisms buried either in the Gaelic or the Scots.

They speak their own localised Gaelic

From a quick look at the map, Allasdale, Borgue ("keep"), Breivig ("broad bay"), Bruernish (something point) and possibly Cleat ("Tveit" - clearing?), Meallard (from Old Norse "melr" meaning sand dunes) are Norse.

German truly has grammatical gender so "he/she" has nothing to do with perceived real life sex. Therefore, "mädchen" is neuter "es" (it) due to having the diminutive -chen ending.

They just explained it, and then you ask about it, as if your prejudice is stronger than their explanation - but try to listen again, as your preconceived terms and categories makes it hard for you to understand what you hear, if you listen closely, that's the problem. Not the definitions of shaetlan on one hand and norn on the other hand. This intellectual problem is one obstacle you share with other majority language speakers, as they think of minority language speakers in relation to national borders. Ideological thinking comes in the way of perceiving how things really are. You think it has to be like this or that, but it hasn't to be, it is in an other way. No offense intended!

@@DNA350ppm I haven't watched the video yet but if someone asks about something that is explained in it my assumption would be that they didn't watch it or they didn't pay attention. The conclusion you jump to is that this is someone with a certain kind of prejudice and I can't help wondering if that in itself isn't prejudice? No offense intended just curious how you know something that I don't get from the comment? Do you know the person or is that in the video as well?

@@Explorer273 To me it was explicit in the video how Norn and Shaetlan are connected, historically and linguistically, and not hard to understand. Do watch the video as a whole, even if the debates are familiar to you, there are many gems, IMHO. Simply why would somebody ask about something that is made clear in the video that provides the answers? My experience as a language teacher, translator, and minority member ,tells me that when somebody doesn't understand clearly explained facts, one way to clarify things is to map the prejudice... In this case I didn't want to assume lack of intelligence, education, or good manners, but could have been that, too. ;-) I make mistakes myself, be sure of that! Of course also I have prejudice. There is a reason why Wittgenstein's "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen" is so widely known! Only, the opposite is true, it is good that we try to learn more and so we need debates and teachers, and books, of course. No offense taken! But were you somehow offended? Do you think there are human beings without prejudice in one field or another, and do you think that discussing, pointing out, and criticizing prejudice is offending?

@@DNA350ppm I have been on the receiving end of this more than once. I often look through the comments to see if there is anything special in the video that triggers comments. You are right about that sometimes or even often a bias can make it harder to see obvious things but claimiing that it's normal is taking it a bit too far. Let's use me as an example. I speak Swedish and Danish so if you pick a random Old Norse word I will know if it still exist in Scandinavia and often how it changed meaning and so on. I then have a name here, ᚢᛁᚴᛁᚴ, Viking, that I picked from a rune stone not far away from where I live. That stone was raised after 1080 and it was a son so there is no way he was an actual Viking. The rune database is free to download and it's easy to confirm that Viking was a job description and not a name until the 19th century. The Old Norse culture had this way of giving new names to adults depending on who they turned out to be. Again I can show you my sources if you wish. So the guess would be that the name Viking was a way to mock him for wishing he had been one. That means my name here is a sort of tribute to the whole culture. The picture I have is also something like that. If you are Swedish you will know exactly what it is, it's the label of Explorer Vodka which, again, you would know used to be "Systembolagets" cheap moonshine version of vodka. I do understand that if you are not aware of Swedish culture now and then you will see something very different and possibly jump to conclusions. It may even be a reason I use it? I'll give you another example. Let's use Harald Fair-Hair and my suspicion that he had as much hair as a cueball the same way a giant boxer is nowadays referred to as "tiny". You see the word "fager" in Swedish means fair but the combination "Hårfagre" is an older word that I have heard used something like three times during my life time. Always used in a mocking way and directed towards men with really bad hair. This is where I'm finally getting to my point. As a Swede I know the modern or almost modern meaning of the word. I would then have the idea that maybe this is what the word meant already in Old Norse? I can't know that. Nobody can. This doesn't mean that it's wrong, it could be and it's not evidence of anything either way. This is where you come in because if I mention it as an idea and a possibility you will probably shred me to pieces because I'm Swedish and jumping to conclusions, right? I just saw you do exactly that to a comment that was, let's call it naive. Does that answer you question?

@@Explorer273 OK - jag känner igen en del av dina argument, och jag känner inte jag behöver lägga till något. Min tanke är att man självklart kollar en video först och frågar sen. Men så klart får man spekulera fritt, ordet är ju fritt här, och ingen är tvungen att läsa något, det är helt frivilligt att göra det om man vill. Jag läste allt du skrev, självklart för mig att göra det. Det är bara kul att du har ett stort historiskt intresse! I Skåne är traditionen med öknamn som tillägg fortfarande välbevarad, och vi har också fina museer här, både inomhus och utomhus, och dessutom en massa "event" och egna varianter av språket. Det vet du säkert redan. Never the less: From beautiful Scania, all the best! 🙂

It seems to walk a fine line between sex and gender. English realizes perceived sex in its pronoun use and has no grammatical gender whereas German has grammatical gender nothing to do with real life sex. This seems sort of in the middle.

This use of she for cars or boats is said with affection in a special context. They would never say she in a formal setting. In a language with true grammatical gender, that word always has that gender in all contexts. It's a matter of grammar.

@@kristofevarsson6903 You are dead wrong and completely uneducated on the topic. It's an ethnolect and sociolect, so while people do use it in some contexts and not in others, this is not primarily in an attempt to portray themselves as hard or gangster. AAVE is used, just as any sociolect, to identify oneself with ones social and linguistic community, in this case the American black community. It is used by gangsters and thugs, but also by students, police officers, and even bankers and lawyers when the context is appropriate for it. The fact that you're from Detroit and see black people speak less AAVE in front of you when they leave the inner city doesn't mean they don't still speak it when they're at home, with family, or in other exclusively black social situations. Just as you might speak to your friends (maybe you're gamers, or metalheads, or whatever else) in a different way than a stranger, your boss, or your mother, using slang specific to your age group and interests, black people speak differently amongst themselves. Just as you shift your speech when you meet people who aren't in your demographic, so do they. That doesn't mean their grammar isn't regular, just that they switch between two completely regular systems depending on context. If you do even the most cursory reading on the subject you'll find that what I'm saying is true. There is a LOT of scholarship on the topic. Happy reading!

@@kristofevarsson6903 To be totally clear here: gangsters and thugs will inevitably also have their own slang and ways of speaking that are distinct and special to them. They may very well be using this speech to signify that they are thugs and gangsters, that they are hard. But it is a mistake to consider that the same as AAVE, a massive phenomenon occurring in all manner of black american contexts outside of criminal life.

OK, sorry to cause bad feeling of any sort. The teacher was married to an African American and his family spoke what he figured out to be a different language, not just a poor, isolated person's accent, so I saw the similarities in what he said in his argument for ebonics being another language to the sorts of arguments people of the United Kingdom might say about Shaetlan. In that context it was easy to see how a flavor of another language could easily be mislabeled or lost. Interesting to me at the time was if my classmates "rednecks" actually spoke another language, too. I often had to look words up, but my parents assured me that southern speech was the same as ours only maybe more like the English spoken in England than our Midwestern American dialect. But, one time in Washington state I was going to an event and my friends were late and I told them that, "I didn't like to get a seat." And one friend replied, "Well, you can certainly stand if you want." I was speaking southern American though not with an accent. That probably happens all of the time with Shaetlan. If you go to the website, you almost think it is written in a bad form of English...see the Ebonic connection?

FYI no one calls it "ebonics" anymore. Both scholars and laymen like to call it "African American Vernacular English", or AAVE for short. The continual tense present in AAVE you bring up is super useful. The classic experiment to illustrate the distinction is showing AAVE speaking Black children a picture of Elmo eating cookies alongside a picture of Cookie Monster with no cookies. If you ask them "Who is eating cookies?", they'll point to Elmo. If you instead ask "Who BE eating cookies?", they point to Cookie Monster. White children with low exposure to AAVE didn't understand the intended distinction and pointed to Elmo both times.

@@JoelDZ It's a dialect. White people who grow up in Black neighborhoods also are able to code switch back and forth between AAVE and proper English. AAVE has retained some of the older terms that were common in English during the era when Africans were transported and enslaved. They were legally forbidden to read and write so they retained and oral tradition including colloquial terms and slang that they passed along to their descendants after slavery ended and they migrated to the north to work in factories and other professions. White settlers were educated and were able to keep up with the language changing into modern English.

No, 2, it got the common gender and neuter from danish.

@@MrKorton so in the cases of “et barn”, “en gutt”, and “ei jente”, is “ei” not a part of Bokmål? Or words like “døra” vs “døren”? I’ve been led to believe, this far, that “ei” and “døra” are feminine forms of their respective words.

@@jackjohnson2309 Written Bokmål has conservative (2 genders) and radical (3 genders) variants. Around Bergen, they stick to two genders but pretty much everywhere else it's three. The spoken language is another matter altogether.

@@egbront1506 ahhh ok. Thank you

@@jackjohnson2309 Don't listen to any of this. Its complete hogwash. There are some dialectical special cases but except from that all dialects and both written versions of Norwegian have three genders, though masculine is verbally on the decline. Its a bit sad that scholars say these things (ps. Im both norwegian and have linguistic academic background).

Why would there be?

theoretically as there was trade connections and raids into northern africa. A couple of guys might have occationally teamed up.

A language is just a dialect with an army...

to be sacrificed for Odinn

I’ll take it