Scotland 19

Listen to Scotland 19, a 50-year-old woman from Shetland Islands, Scotland, and also Australia. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 50

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 16/07/1959

PLACE OF BIRTH: Shetland Islands, Scotland

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: operations manager at a university in Australia

EDUCATION: advanced diploma

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject hasn’t lived in the Shetland Islands for nearly 20 years, and when recorded had lived in Melbourne, Australia, for the previous 10 years.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject cites the influence of television and other media over the past 50 years as responsible for a remarkable change in the strength of the dialect of the Shetland Islands.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Geraldine Cook

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 09/04/2010

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Erm, so I’m originally from the Shetland Islands, which is, I think, it’s about 120 or 180 miles north of the mainland of Scotland. Erm, I, I left the Shetland Islands about 20 years ago now and, er, so, certainly my accent and, and I notice my family are still there, has changed considerably. However, it’s still, I believe, from people’s, erm, I suppose, expressions when I start to speak, it’s still fairly strong. The, er, island that I came from was, erm well, Shetland is made up of a group of small islands. The island that I grew up on was the island called Bressa. It’s an island with about 180 people on it, and, er, I lived there for about, well, most of sort of, thirty years in fact on the island. Um, I still go back regularly, and my family still lives there, but the islands are, erm, there’s a lot of dialects around the islands, and each island, I mean, it might only be about six miles long but it has a very distinctive dialect on the island, so much so, that the other islanders know immediately when you start speaking which island you’ve come from. Er, my island which is very close to the mainland Lerwick was probably, well certainly to me, it seemed one of the less, erm, uh, strong dialects I suppose. The further north, erm, you got, the stronger they were, to the point that with a couple of the islands I really struggle to understand what people were saying quite often. Erm, but it was, uh, yeah, it’s a really interesting range of a sort of cross between Scandinavian I suppose in some of the words, and erm, and into Scottish. So, it’s, I mean, I think the islanders would certainly connect themselves stronger to Scandinavia. There’s a lot of words distinctive to the Shetland language. In fact, there’s a dictionary on Shetland language that’s available, so erm, which isn’t that big a dictionary but it’s, er, it does cover a range of words, many of which I don’t know because it’s very much old Shetland rather than the latter day, which is, of course, the island has now has been very much affected by having access to television and everything else and radio changed them completely, so I suppose in the last ah, fifty years. There’s this remarkable change in the strength of the dialect.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Geraldine Cook

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 12/07/2010

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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