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- Title
Fishing for words: the taboo language of Shetland fishermen and the dating of Norn language death.
- Authors
Knooihuizen, Remco
- Abstract
There has been considerable debate about when Norn, the Scandinavian language formerly spoken in Orkney and Shetland, died as a community language in the islands. Arguments thus far have focused primarily on second-hand commentary from travel and census reports, sparking disputes about the credibility of these sources. Linguistic evidence, although very little survives, is seldom used systematically in the debate about when Norn died. I argue that a list of thirty Norn words collected in 1774 can tell us about the state of the language at the time, and can thus be used as evidence in this debate. 1
- Subjects
ORKNEY (Scotland); SHETLAND (Scotland); SCOTLAND; OLD Norse language; LANGUAGE obsolescence; FISHERS
- Publication
Transactions of the Philological Society, 2008, Vol 106, Issue 1, p100
- ISSN
0079-1636
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1467-968X.2007.00202.x