Was/were alternation in Shetland English

Abstract

Dialect use in Shetland's main town, Lerwick, demonstrates substantial interspeaker variability in the youngest generation, with some young speakers never using dialect features and some using them at rates similar to older generations. Such extreme interspeaker variability may be a harbinger of a complete shift to standardized varieties of English in subsequent generations as was suggested by Dorian in her research on Gaelic‐speaking communities. This paper attempts to examine the extent to which these predictions are accurate, by focussing on a set of features (was/were variation) which began shifting towards standardized English in the middle aged generation. This makes it possible to concretely gauge what the effects of considerable interspeaker variability are on subsequent generations. The separate, yet linked, distribution of the features studied also makes it possible to examine constant rate effects more closely.

Viewing dialect change through acceptability judgments: A case study in Shetland dialect

“…However, a number of recent works have noted that Shetland dialect appears to be obsolescing (van Leyden 2004;Melchers & Sundkvist 2010;Smith & Durham 2011;2012;Sundkvist 2011;Durham 2013;Jamieson 2015). In particular, Smith & Durham's (2011;2012) research demonstrates that young speakers of the dialect have reduced rates of both Shetland-specific and Scotland-wide lexical, phonological and syntactic variants as compared to both older and middle-aged speakers.…”

“…In this paper, I focus on one community where a number of forms in the dialect are said to be undergoing obsolescence: the Shetland dialect of Scots. Linguistic change and the loss of features in this community is argued to be happening rapidly -even from one generation to the next (Smith & Durham 2011, 2012Durham 2013). Shetland dialect is thus an ideal testbed for seeing how a community of speakers who are undergoing potential language loss, and exhibiting the unpredictable patterns seen at the end of a change, behave when presented with acceptability judgment tasks which ask them to make explicit judgments on dialect variants -in this case, -n, a particle used in certain types of biased questions.…”