UK

Now recognized: An old language with Scandinavian roots in the North Sea

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Shetland landskab

Shaetlan is a Mixed Language spoken in the Shetland archipelago, the northernmost part of the UK. As shown in the blog from 2022, it emerged due to a long drawn contact situation. There was a situation stable of Norn/Scots bilingualism. Norn was a West Scandinavian variety and Scots a West Germanic variety. This bilingualism was additionally in sustained contact with the Dutch/Low Germanic varieties. Those were spoken by those involved in the Hanseatic and Dutch fishing trades. This multilingual ecology led to Shaetlan, a Grammar-Lexicon Mixed Language with a predominantly Scandinavian grammar, but with a mainly Anglian vocabulary.

Shaetlan serves as an example after the fact for Bakker’s type of mixed languages that he calls G-L languages. These tend … ↪

A new book about the history of English

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submission 346 291 coverImage en US e1660039415426

More than 50 years ago, Barbara Strang published her highly innovative book A History of English (1970, Methuen £2.25) which, daringly, began its chronological treatment of the English language in the (then) present-day, with “Changes in living memory” (Strang was born in 1925), and then worked its way backwards. The first chapter in the chronological sequence was devoted to “1970-1770”, and the final chapter covered the period “Before 370”.

The obvious advantage of this strategy is that you can start readers off in a place they are familiar with, and then take them on a journey to increasingly remote and less familiar periods of time. Strang’s way of dealing with this material was an intriguing and attractive one, and in … ↪