Abstract
The local dialect spoken in the Shetland Isles constitutes a form of Lowland Scots. It has been suggested that stressed syllables in Shetland Scots tend to contain either a long vowel followed by a short consonant (V:C) or a short vowel followed by a long consonant (VC:), and furthermore that this pattern constitutes a trace of complementary quantity in Norn, a Nordic language spoken in Shetland approximately until the end of the eighteenth century. The existence of such a pattern has also been supported by acoustic measurements. Following a summary and overview of Norn’s demise in the Shetland Isles, this paper presents a regional survey of the relationship between vowel and consonant duration in stressed syllables in Shetland Scots. Based on acoustic data from 43 speakers, representing ten separate regions across the Shetland Isles, the inverse correlation between vowel and consonant duration is assessed. The results reveal that the inverse correlation is strongest in the northern part of Shetland and weakest in the south, and displays a general north-to-south decline across Shetland. The results are thus generally consistent with predictions that follow from regional variation concerning Norn’s death; evidence suggests that it survived the longest in the northern parts of Shetland.
Funding statement: Funding: This research was supported by a grant from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our warmest gratitude to all the Shetlanders who participated in the regional survey. We would also like thank all those who assisted us in various ways in recruiting participants. This includes several members of the organization Shetland Forwirds (http://www.shetlanddialect.org.uk/), in particular Laureen Johnson and Mary Blance. To those who took their time to act as contact persons for their particular region we are forever indebted. Furthermore, we would like to thank Doreen Waugh and Gunnel Melchers for their much appreciated help during the planning of this project. This research was funded by a grant from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Finally, we wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Professor Hubert Cuyckens, editor of Folia Linguistica, for their perceptible and helpful comments.
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts
- A regional survey of the relationship between vowel and consonant duration in Shetland Scots
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts
- A regional survey of the relationship between vowel and consonant duration in Shetland Scots
- The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages
- Associated motion in Mojeño Trinitario: Some typological considerations
- An existential expletive: fii of Jordanian Arabic
- Prosodic phrasing of relative clauses with two possible antecedents in Spanish: A comparison of Spanish native speakers and L1 Basque bilingual speakers
- Variable coding and object alignment in Spanish: A corpus-based approach
- Displaced directives: Subjunctive free-standing que-clauses vs. imperatives in Spanish
- Book Reviews
- David Fertig: Analogy and morphological change
- Adam Głaz. Lublin: Extended Vantage Theory in Linguistic Application: The Case of the English Articles
- Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsanen: English historical pragmatics