Drivers of morphosyntactic obsolescence: Communities of place vs communities of practice in the Shetland Islands

Event details

Abstract:

In this talk, I investigate morphosyntactic obsolescence across communities in the Shetland Islands. Shetland Scots has been identified as potentially obsolescing at least since the turn of the millennium (Tait 2001, van Leyden 2004), with Smith & Durham (2011, 2012) finding evidence of rapid change in progress for a substantial proportion of younger speakers in the main town, Lerwick. Outside Lerwick it is claimed there are distinct dialect regions (Johnston 1997:448), which are argued to be at risk of becoming “less distinct, less regionally diversified” (Sundvkist 2020:171).

I present data on six morphosyntactic features of the Shetland dialect, taken from the Scots Syntax Atlas corpus (Smith et al. 2019), which includes data from two older (65+) and two younger (18-25) speakers from each of four communities across the Shetland Islands. Results show that the older speakers are actually fairly uniform in their use of non-standard morphosyntax, regardless of community. However, for the younger speakers, obsolescence is progressing at different rates across each of the communities, and across each of the features – in effect, creating more distinctive dialect regions, as well as exhibiting concentration/specialisation of features in among the more general pattern of dissipation.

I discuss these results in terms of (areal) community structure and social history, and argue for the importance of the individual speakers’ communities of practice (e.g. Moore 2010) in understanding this ongoing process of obsolescence.