Talk:Shetland dialect
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 | On 16 October 2025, it was proposed that this article be moved to Shaetlan. The result of the discussion was not moved. |
Requested move 18 February 2020
- The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) —Nnadigoodluck🇳🇬 18:13, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment - that the terminology of a handful of linguists should not override the terminology of the thousands speakers of the dialect.The traditional variety spoken on the Shetland Islands has been referred to by different names. The term "Insular Scots" is sometimes used by scholars to indicate the affinities between the varieties spoken on Shetland and on Orkney (see e.g. Johnston 1997; Millar 2007, 2018). The speakers themselves, however, refer to their language as either "Shetland dialect", "Shetland" or "Shetlandic". The latter is controversial and seems to be disliked by most speakers, who tend to prefer the term "Shetland". In this article, I will use the neutral, and by the speakers themselves accepted, term "Shetland dialect" to differentiate between the language and the place.
While it appears that more folk to tend to search for terms like "Shetland Scots" and "Shetlandic" here on Wikipedia, I suspect that most of these searches come from those who are generally unaware of the terminology used here, and therefore search statistics should not be taken as gospel for what is most commonly used to refer to it. In person here in Shetland, I have never heard it naturally called Shetland Scots.
A point brought up against a name similar to this previously was that it doesn't address the question, "dialect of what?" In my mind this is not terribly relevant - there is only one Shetland dialect, which is a dialect of Scots, and that will become immediately clear upon reading the first sentence of the article. The only possible point of confusion is the Norn language, which was its own language and has its own name (mostly) sorted out (and there's a "Not to be confused with" link at the top of the article already). There aren't specific dialects of Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian or anything else like that attributed to Shetland. See other articles such as Suzhou dialect - it's not "Suzhou dialect of Chinese", that's not necessary.
The only other criticism I can think of for this name is that very occasionally, some folk in Shetland like to point out that using the term "Shetland dialect" over just "Shetland" implies that it is somehow a lesser variety of speech - while "Shetland" could be considered a language, "dialect" is taken as an insult. While I understand this reasoning, I think it would be needlessly confusing (as said the previous paper quoted) to have both the place and the variety of speech using the same name in this article.
WP:DIALECT advises that "The term dialect should only be used for distinct but mutually intelligible varieties of a language". This is an accurate assessment of Shetland's variety of speech - it is mostly understandable by Orcadians and to a lesser degree Scots speakers on the Mainland.
The proposed title is recognisable, natural, precise enough, concise enough, and most importantly respects the name used by native speakers - which the current name does not. Griceylipper (talk) 00:30, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
- Support, per this ngram. Colin Gerhard (talk) 14:24, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
- The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
