• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1369

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

30 years later: Change and stability in attitudes towards the dialect in Shetland

Authors: Durham, Mercedes
Submitted by: Durham, Mercedes (Cardiff University/University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom)

It is well established that change in language use can be preceded by changes in linguistic attitudes; often, however, it is only once change is well underway that attitudes come to be examined, meaning that we do not necessarily have concrete information about prior linguistic attitudes.           

This paper attempts to address this and offers a longitudinal perspective on change in dialect attitudes by focussing on two linked studies conducted on the Shetland Islands, at the far north of the United Kingdom, roughly 30 years apart.

The data presented comes from questionnaires examining the attitudes of Shetland children aged 13 to 16 towards the dialect, as well as their reported use of it; 344 were collected in 1983 and 484 in 2010. This represents the majority of children between those ages in Shetland, as classes in most of the Shetland schools were targeted. In the years between the first attitudinal study and the second, Shetland’s situation has changed considerably; both socially: the discovery of oil in the North Sea and the construction of the Sullom Voe oil terminal brought an influx of outsiders to the island, and linguistically: younger speakers have been found to use the dialect less than previous generations (Melchers and Sundkvist 2010, Smith and Durham 2011).

The possible affect of incomers to the island is clear from the results of the two studies. The attitudinal data considers not merely children whose parents were also born on Shetland, but any child in the classes studied. In 2010 there is a higher proportion of children born and being raised in Shetland but with parents born off the islands than in 1983 (14% vs. 4%), while the rates of children born off the islands and with no familial ties to Shetland has stayed nearly the same (10-11%). These Shetland-born but not Shetland origin children have very different attitudes in 2010 than in 1983 and this combined with their higher numbers is one possible explanation for why fewer young speakers use the dialect.

The attitudinal data is also revealing in terms of reported dialect use: as expected, it is clear that in some contexts the dialect is no longer considered an option, but new questions about social media (e-mail, text and facebook) show that the dialect is still used frequently in some contexts even by children without familial ties to Shetland. The attitudinal results thus help us gain a better picture of the dialect shift which is currently underway in Shetland and allow us to better understand how the two may be linked.

References

Melchers, G. and Sundkvist, P. 2010. Shetland and Orkney. In Schreier, D., P. Trudgill, E. W. Schneider, and J. P. Williams (eds.) The Lesser-Known Varieties of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 17–34.

Smith, J. and Durham, M. 2011. A tipping point in dialect obsolescence? Change across the generations in Lerwick, Shetland. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15 (2), 197-225.