LL-L: "Code switching" LOWLANDS-L, 10.MAR.2000 (08) [E]

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From: John M. Tait [jmtait at altavista.net]
Subject: LL-L: "Code switching" LOWLANDS-L, 08.MAR.2000 (02) [E]

Ian wrote:

>Secondly, I have often wondered about the Lerwick passage you mentioned
>in Crystal.

Here is a more detailed critique, which I wrote recently for another purpose.

John M. Tait.

Misleading representations of Shetlandic in works of reference can
sometimes be traced back to the presuppositions of the studies on which
they are based. Whereas the article on Orkney and Shetland Dialect in The
Oxford Companion to the English Language, by Scots scholar A.J. Aitken, is
excellent within its space limitations, the treatment of Shetlandic by
David Crystal, in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (p.
332) is another matter. First he gives an example of Shetlandic writing by
John J. Graham:

'Shetland’s ‘ain aald language’ has its röts awa back ida Norn tongue at
wis spokken in Shetland fae aboot da nint tae da seeventeent century. Da
Scots fock at cam among wis fae da sixteent century an on brocht der ain
leid, an at da lang an da lent da twa languages melled tagidder to mak da
tongue we caa Shetlandic. While dis wis gjaan on, anidder wye o spaekin an
writin wis shapin da local speech. Dis wis English - ösed by da Kirk, da
laa-coorts an ida sköls.'

>From J.J. Graham, 1981.

Then, remarking that ‘much of the visual identity of this style is due to
the choice of spelling (e.g. da for the)’ he comments: ‘Many Shetlanders,
of course, speak a much less distinctive dialect, as seen in this extract
from a 64-year-old man’s account of the fire festival, Up-Helly-Aa. The
language is essentially Standard English, with just the occasional dialect
form.’

'well - hit’s a procession a procession of maybe nine hundred guizers and
if you do not ken what a guizer is that is somebody that dresses up to
pretend to be something else...in the old days part of the reason for the
festival was to celebrate the end of the dark days of winter and the return
of the sun well whatever else has changed the weather has not changed very
muckle - hit’s still the dark days of winter..and there’s nobody now more
than in the old days blither to see the return of the sun even though it’s
still not very high in the sky than the Shetlander is.'

After B. Oreström, 1985.

This is certainly little different from standard English. It is, however,
very unlikely to be representative of the speech of a 64 year old man in
Lerwick in 1985. The first impression one gets is of someone doing his best
to speak standard English in order to be understood by a foreigner.
However, on examining the source of the above extract (A Corpus of Shetland
English, edited by Bengt Oreström) it becomes evident that there was a
deliberate policy of Anglicising the texts in order to make them more
readable by non-Shetlanders. Oreström says:

'As the purpose of this corpus is to supply a material chiefly for studies
in grammar and intonation, the local writing convention with all its
problems would be an unnecessary complication for a reader not familiar
with this form. The written representation of the corpus material should
provide for easy readability also to non-Shetlandic users. Therefore, the
standard English orthographical convention has been adhered to as far as
possible. Only in cases where a word is not easily recognisable as an
ordinary English one and/or is exclusively local, has it been written in a
specific way and given in the Glossary.'

In order to illustrate the effect of this policy of Anglicisation, the same
text is given, by Oreström, in both a typical Shetlandic spelling and the
Anglicised form.

(a) 'Noo dan does du see dey wir dis peerie Jockie boy at bade up aboot
Hurdibeck wi his grandmidder an he hed a lovely peerie dug for his very
owen. An so dey wir wan time at he happened to be oot a daeks lookin among
da twartree sheep at dey hed at Aisha. An him an his dug wir comin hame
ower be da sooth side a Turrieshun on dy wye a da Dutch Loch, him whistling
an his dug keepin closs be his fit laaching away with his tongue hingin oot.'

(b) 'Now then does du see there were this peerie Jockie boy that bade up
about Hurdibeck with his grandmother and he had a lovely peerie dog for his
very own. And so there were one time that he happened to be out of dykes
looking among the twartree sheep that they had at Aisha. And him and his
dog were coming home over by the south side of Turrieshun on their way of
the Dutch Loch, him whistling and his dog keeping close by his foot
laughing away with his tongue hanging out.'

It can be seen here that the Anglicisation of the text involves (a) the
replacement of all English cognate words by their English cognates (e.g.
hame by home; da by the; dug by dog; daek by dyke; noo by now; laach by
laugh; closs by close; owen by own; be by by; fit by foot) thus obscuring
all the phonological differences between Shetlandic and standard English,
including (b) ‘replacing’ consonants which are present in English but not
in Shetlandic (e.g. wi by with; at by that; a by of; and dey by there.) The
last of these - the replacement of dey by there - is a particularly bad
representation of the Shetlandic, because the grammatical use of dae (as it
is spelt in this course) is different from that of English there, in that
it is always followed by a plural verb, and its replacement by there gives
the effect of an in-between language which is neither Shetlandic nor
English. In fact, the passage as a whole reads like a Shetlander trying
hard to speak English and ‘faain trowe it’ (falling through it) - exactly
the impression given by the example which Crystal cites to prove that many
Shetlanders speak a much less distinctive dialect.

It can be seen that, when this Anglicisation of the second text is allowed
for, there is little difference between the linguistic nature of the Graham
and the Lerwick extracts to justify the claim that the Lerwick extract is
‘much less distinctive’. Neither passage contains very many words without
close cognates in English. To a Shetlander, the only unusual word in the
first extract is leid, which Graham seems to have borrowed from Lallans or
literary Scots. Of the words glossed by Crystal, röts (roots), ida (in
the), fock (folk), at wis (that was), brocht (brought), and ösed (used) are
all close cognates of English, of the type which Oreström’s policy would
have Anglicised in the second text. The only peculiarly Shetland idiom is
at da lang an da lent, meaning at long last; and the only word which does
not have a particularly close English cognate is the familiar Scots kirk.
In the Lerwick extract, although fewer words are glossed, two of these -
ken and muckle - are not close cognates of standard English words, though
again they are common Scots; and the implication is that the type of words
which are glossed in the first text have simply been replaced by their
English cognates in the second. It can be seen, then, that it is really
only the stated process of Anglicisation followed by Oreström which makes
the second extract seem significantly less distinctive from standard
English than the first. Whatever may be said about the validity of this
practice for the specialised purposes of Oreström, it is certainly
remarkable that Crystal should have taken, as an example to illustrate the
non-distinctiveness of Shetlandic, a passage which has explicitly had most
of the distinctive features removed.

When we investigate the type of differences from standard English which
occur in the Graham text - differences which Crystal attributes partly to
‘the choice of spelling’ - we can see that most of these reflect actual
differences in Shetlandic pronunciation as opposed to that of standard
English; and moreover, that most of these differences are phonological
rather than merely phonetic. For example, there is a phonological
difference between the ‘d’ sound and the ‘th’ sound (both voiced and
unvoiced) in Shetlandic, and therefore it would not be practical to
represent the ‘d’ sound by a written <th>. Similarly, the <ö> spelling used
by Graham represents a different phoneme from that represented by the <oo>
in e.g. coorts; <ae> in spaekin is different from both <ea> and <ai>; and
<aa> is phonologically distinct from <a>. The choice of spellings is
therefore a fairly minimal representation of the essential features of
Shetlandic phonology. There has been no attempt to make the spelling more
distinctive from that of standard English in other ways - for example, by
spelling language as langwidj, tongue as tung or back as bakk. The only
obvious concessions to non-English spelling conventions, apart from
necessary indications of phonological distinctions, are the use of <j>
rather than <y> in gjaan and the double <k> - which is uncommon in English
spelling - in spokken. Graham does not even go out of his way to avoid
English spellings where the Shetlandic sound is different - using e.g. has
rather than the more typical Shetlandic haes; Shetland rather than
Shaetlan; and the English form speech rather than the more colloquial
spaek. Far from choosing non-English spellings deliberately to emphasise,
far less exaggerate, the differences between Shetlandic and English,
Graham’s spelling is conservative, using only the minimum changes from
standard English convention in order to represent the Shetlandic
pronunciation. Apart from the borrowed word leid, the passage as a whole is
written in natural everyday Shetlandic.

This is an illustration of the effect which presuppositions can have on the
representation of language in writing. Writers of literary Scots are often
accused of exaggerating the difference between Scots and English. Here,
however, we seem to have the opposite tendency. It would seem that Crystal
- as his comment that ‘of course’ many Shetlanders speak a much less
distinctive dialect would imply - is presupposed to regard the Graham text
as artificially distinct from English, and thus has chosen a text in which
the distinctive features have been removed in order to represent it as
closer to standard English. It is true that many younger Shetlanders in
Lerwick now speak a much less distinctive language than that represented in
the Graham text - a language which is little different from Scottish
Standard English - but that would have been extremely atypical of the
speech of a 64 year old in the early 1980s.

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