Shetland dialect

Shetland dialect
Shetlandic, Shetland, Modern Shetlandic Scots
Shætlan
Christine De Luca speaking Shetland dialect
Pronunciation	IPA: [ˈʃe̞tlənd̥]
Region	Shetland
Native speakers	3,500 ("used at home") (2011)[1] 11,000 ("can speak")
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic North Sea Germanic Anglo-Frisian Anglic Scots Insular Scots Shetland dialect
Early forms	Northumbrian Old English Early Middle English Early Scots Middle Scots Scots with significant Norn substrata
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-2	sco
ISO 639-3	sco
Glottolog	shet1241  Shetland Scots
Linguasphere	52-ABA-aad[2]
IETF	sco-u-sd-gbzet
Shetland in Scotland
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Shetland dialect (also variously known as Shetlandic;^[3] broad or auld Shetland or Shaetlan;^[4] and referred to as Modern Shetlandic Scots (MSS) by some linguists) is a dialect of Insular Scots spoken in Shetland, an archipelago to the north of mainland Scotland. It is derived from the Scots dialects brought to Shetland from the end of the fifteenth century by Lowland Scots, mainly from Fife and Lothian,^[5] with a degree of Norse influence^[6][7][8] from the Norn language, which is an extinct North Germanic language spoken on the islands until the late 18th century.^[9]

Consequently, Shetland dialect contains many words of Norn origin. Many of them, if they are not place-names, refer to e.g. seasons, weather, plants, animals, places, food, materials, tools, colours, parts of boats.^[10]

Like Doric in North East Scotland, Shetland dialect retains a high degree of autonomy due to geography and isolation from southern dialects. It has a large amount of unique vocabulary but as there are no standard criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, whether or not Shetland dialect is a separate language from Scots is much debated.^[11]