A Danish review of the book can be read here.
Shetland is an archipelago and it belongs administratively to Scotland. Scotland belongs administratively to the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is liberated from the European Union, but it used to be part of the EU. The British do not feel European, at least a small majority, so they brexited. The Scots do not feel English, but they are not allowed to vote for independence. The Shetlanders do not feel Scottish, and there are a fair few who would like to have Home Rule, somewhat like the Faroe Islands have within the Danish Kingdom. There are some 23,000 people in Shetland (yes, IN Shetland, not ON Shetland). They have their own language.
Norn was once spoken on these islands, after Shetland was populated first with Pre-Indo-European humans some 6,000 years ago who then disappeared. Then the Picts came and disappeared, probably during the first millennium. Scandinavian settlers arrived around 790-800. As early as the Neolithic times, the earliest settlers had brought sheep, cattle and horses from the mainland. The Scandinavians bred horses, sheep and sheep dogs, and they stayed. They continued to speak Scandinavian (called Norn) until the Brits forced them to shift to English. Norn died out between 1850 and 1900. In a recent interview, a Shetlander mentioned the memory of a woman who died in 1925 who called the language Danska Tonga, not Norn (Velupillai & Mullay 2025, p. 38). The current language, Shaetlan, is a West Germanic language with remarkable influence from Scandinavian.
Some months ago, I received a book about the Shaetlan language as a token of friendship from one of the authors, Viveka Velupillai. She is a Swedish linguist, the author of a textbook on linguistic typology, the tense-mood-aspect system of Hawai’ian Creole and a textbook on pidgins, creoles and mixed languages and a very proficient knitter. Her favorite author in the world is Svend Aage Madsen from Aarhus. Being a specialist in contact languages, and with her Scandinavian background, she wanted to check out the Shaetlan language and write a grammar of it, since she could not find a decent grammar of the variety. She arrived there about ten years ago and decided to stay there. The other author is Roy Mullay, graphic designer and native speaker.
Is Shaetlan a mixed language with Scandinavian grammar and roots from Anglic? Is it a dialect of English or Scots, or is it an independent Germanic language? How much Scandinavian is there in the lexicon? How different is it from Scandinavian? The book discusses all these questions, and it gives the answers, for the most part. The book is bilingual, perhaps the first academic book in Shaetlan, and it has just as many pages as there are days in a year. One can read the book double speed, by either reading only the Shaetlan text, or only the English text. I went for the latter. The two languages are interspersed with different fonts rather than separate pages. One gets used to it quickly, and sometimes you find yourself reading Shaetlan, and you realize it is also a Germanic language.
In the book we learn that there were four distinct varieties of Old English, and that Shaetlan and English derive from different varieties of Old English: the ancestral languages of Shaetlan are Norn (Scandinavian) and Scots, and the ancestral variety of English is Mercian Old English. From the fifth century, people from Jutland in (what is now) Northern Denmark, Angles from Southern Denmark and Northern Germany, Saxons from Northern Germany and the Netherlands, and Frisians from the Netherlands (p. 34-35) moved to the British Isles. Here is a quote from the book giving more detail:
Hence, English as it has come to us as an international language has a different North Sea Germanic source than Scots and Shaetlan. Still, they remain Germanic languages. There is some mutual intelligibility between Scots, Shaetlan and English, especially in writing. As for the spoken languages, reports are contradictory: some claim very low intelligibility, others claim high intelligibility. It is perhaps comparable with Scandinavian languages. Some claim 90 % intelligibility, others claim 10 % intelligibility, and not all of it is related to the degree of exposure.
The book is clear in its message: Shaetlan is not a dialect of English, and not a dialect of Scots either.
Obviously both Scots and Shaetlan have undergone English influence due to the dominance of English in the school system, from the 18th century in Shaetlan, which would normally increase intelligibility.
For Scandinavians, the influence from Norn is obvious. In phonology, it has some rounded front vowels like /y/ and /ø/ (written <ü> and <ø> respectively in the book), pulmonic ingressive speech (prominent in Scandinavian languages, but also found elsewhere in the North Atlantic, perhaps via Scandinavian influence), which means: speaking while breathing in. It has dental rather than alveolar stops (the <t>, <d> and >n> are pronounced near the teeth, not near the alveolar ridge). It has three grammatical genders, still present in some Danish dialects (most have only two), reflexive verbs (Danish: sæt dig ned, Shetland set dee doon or set du dee doon), three degrees of deictic distance, and a range of expressions, like wi dat sam ‘immediately’, clearly a calque on Scandinavian med det samme). It has a politeness distinction in the second person (du/dee versus you/you), not existing in English.
A range of such properties are pointed out in the book.
They also used lexical comparisons and grammatical comparisons between a range of languages involved in the genesis of Shaetlan. Figure 8 from the book shows that Swedish and Shaetlan are grammatically closer to each other than to Standard English. Unfortunately, however, the authors do not provide the underlying data for this.
They also provide a lexical comparison. Here it appears that Shaetlan is more different from Scots (of which it is sometimes said to be a dialect) than Scots is from English. The distance between Shaetlan and Scots/English is also greater than the distance between Norwegian and Swedish. The latter two are universally considered distinct languages, whereas Shaetlan would be an English dialect. Here I do know what the underlying data are, as I used this as an exercise in class: students received Swadesh lists of the different languages and were asked to measure similarity using a computer program that has become more or less standard in measuring lexical distances between languages. Swadesh lists are lists of a fixed set of 100 or 200 words that are supposed to be universal, and these are often used to measure how different languages are to one another.
The text and the information given is of high quality. Also, the paper quality, the layout and the physical properties of the hardbound book are excellent. The contents are praised by a range of leading linguists. In the beginning of the book, seven native speakers of Shaetlan write about their experiences with Shaetlan and their attitudes to their native tongue.
The authors know their stuff. They invariably compare Shaetlan with the languages of the world. Shaetlan has rounded vowels, unlike English, which are found in many Western European languages, but they are rare in the rest of the world. Polar questions have a falling intonation, which is very rare in the languages of the world. Most languages use rising intonation, a question particle or other means to express questions to which “yes” or “no” would be appropriate answers, but here Shaetlan is almost unique. There are many illustrations in the book, all of which are appropriate and clear. Many of them are inspired by memes.
I liked the book a lot, but I do have some critical remarks about the book. Even though the authors explain their choice of orthography, I am not so happy with it. Ideally, a writing system makes use of one letter for each phoneme/speech sound, but that is not the case in the book. Their choice was to make a compromise between on the one hand existing spellings used in the dozens of books of local poetry and history, and what people use when sending messages to each other, and on the other hand they wanted to use some phonemic principles. This is perhaps the best choice given the circumstances, but as a linguist one would like to see more consistency. From experience, I know that speakers of a minority language who only know the weird, bizarre and inconsistent spelling of English may think that is normal, and it is hard to change deeply rooted habits of spelling. If one has a systematic mind, one wonders, why would one use <k> for /k/ in some cases, but <c> for others? Here, the origins of the words play a role: <k> for Scandinavian roots, and <c> for English-origin words.
The book is bilingual, and luckily the authors have no purist attitudes. There are many loanwords, also in the technical area of linguistics, and those are written as in English, and rightfully so, in my view. They are probably pronounced closer to English than to Shaetlan. On the other hand, for my taste the number of technical terms could be reduced. Why use terms like “animate/inanimate”, if one also can say that some words refer to living beings, and others to non-living things? Perhaps the authors also see it as their task to introduce the readers to technical linguistic vocabulary. That is a good idea as not many readers may be familiar with it. But it may distance them from the text, which often reads more like a university textbook than to a popular introduction to the language. In other words, who is the audience for the book? It seems more easily accessible to (students of) linguistics than to most Shetlanders. The presence of a 15-page glossary with technical terms and their explanation is of course of great help, but not always understandable without prior knowledge of linguistics.
The Shaetlan language is now officially recognized as a separate language on October 15 2025, and no doubt this book and its authors and many contributors have contributed to this. A range of famous linguists have expressed their praise about the book on the back cover.
There is much more to say about the book, but I stop here.
The book is published by a small publishing house Kalafine-Skrits in Shetland and should be present in all Shetland homes and in all Scandinavian libraries.
Kalafine-Skrits at £34, ISBN 978-1-0684573-0-2.
The book can be ordered here: https://www.iheardee.com/kalafine-skrits-bookshop
The printed book is 34 GBP, the digital version 20 GBP.
Peter Bakker is a linguist at Aarhus University. He works on contact languages. He has never been to Scotland or Shetland. He owns a book “Teach yourself more German”, but the book teaches you Scottish Gaelic.
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