Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 brill.com/jlc Preaspiration in Shetland Norn Remco Knooihuizen Rijksuniversiteit Groningen [email protected] Abstract The Shetland dialect of Scots does not contain preaspiration, a phonetic areal feature that is otherwise prevalent in languages around the North Atlantic Ocean. While it is understood that Shetland’s pre-language shift Scandinavian variety, Norn, did contain preaspiration, an analysis of phonetic transcriptions from Jakob Jakobsen’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, collected in the 1890s, shows a more complicated picture: preaspiration occurs in only 11% of relevant vowel-stop sequences, but in 92% of relevant sonorant-stop and sonorant- fricative sequences. This article provides a contact-based explanation of the gradual disappearance of preaspiration from Shetland. The proposed trajectory of change is made up of a series of language and dialect contact-induced sub-changes and reflects the influence of Norn as well as of successive waves of immigration from the Scottish mainland. In the first stage, during language shift, preaspiration in vowel-stop sequences disappeared as it (co-)signaled a phonemic contrast in Norn not neces- sary for Scots, but (non-phonemic) preaspiration in sonorant-stop/fricative sequences was retained. In a later stage, dialect contact after renewed immigration from the Scottish mainland caused voiceless stops to be unaspirated, removing the phonetic basis for preaspiration also in the remaining contexts. The study highlights the different susceptibility of phonetic and phonemic features in contact- induced change and calls for further integration of second-language acquisition study and varia- tionist sociolinguistics into historical linguistics. Keywords preaspiration; sonorant devoicing; Shetland Norn; historical linguistics; language contact 1. Introduction Many linguistic studies aim to explain why obscure features occur in a lan- guage, or why very common features are absent from a language. This study is * This paper would not have been possible without the contributions to data coding made by Anne-Mette Hermans. I have also benefited greatly from discussions with Warren Maguire, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Pieter Muysken on Shetland dialectology and contact linguistics. Conference audiences in Leiden and Groningen have given constructive feedback which has © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/19552629-006001012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:17:06AM via free access <UN> R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 49 somewhat of an anomaly in that it focuses on the absence from a language of a relatively uncommon feature. The paper has its roots in an overheard com- ment during the coffee break at a conference, where one of the attendees remarked to another that it was surprising there is no preaspiration in Shetland, where preaspiration would be expected. There was no quick answer at the cof- fee table, and as will be shown in this paper, there is no quick answer at all. Preaspiration in Shetland is complicated, but a discussion of the feature does allow us to address some interesting issues in the study of language contact, historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics. 1.1. Shetland’s Linguistic History Shetland is an archipelago in the North Atlantic, some 200 kilometres North of Scotland, to which it has belonged politically since 1469. The islands had previously been a (Dano-)Norwegian colony since they were settled from Norway in the 8th century. When Shetland became Scottish in 1469, the main language of the islands was Norn, a West Scandinavian language closely related to Faroese, Icelandic, and Norwegian. From the late 16th century, Scottish linguistic influence became greater in the islands, among other things through a mass immigra- tion from the Scottish Lowlands (Donaldson, 1983). The integration of these migrants (Knooihuizen, 2008b) was one of the main triggers of a rapid lan- guage shift from Norn to Scots.1 The development of Shetland Scots is a com- plicated story that needs to account for influences from both Scottish immigrant dialects and Norn; Trudgill’s (2004) model of new-dialect forma- tion appears to be able to give an adequate explanation (Millar, 2008; Knooihuizen, 2009; see Millar, 2010, for a parallel development in neigh- bouring Orkney). There are no clear and reliable sources of Norn as a living language much beyond the beginning of the 18th century (Barnes, 1998: 26; Knooihuizen, 2008a). helped improve this paper. I am also indebted to Chris McCully and to two anonymous review- ers for the Journal of Language Contact for their comments on an earlier version of the paper. For all the shortcomings this paper may have, it would have been all the worse without their suggestions. 1 The spoken dialect on hetlandS clearly has its roots in Older Scots (van Leyden, 2004: 16) but there has been influence from English on Scots writing in Shetland from an early date. Only later did this influence spread to the spoken language as well, first as a form of bidialectism, and later also influencing Shetlanders’ native dialect (Smith and Durham, 2011; 2012). For reasons of consistency, the Shetland dialect will be referred to here as a form of Scots, but this should not be seen to indicate Scots as an entity completely separate and independent from (other) varieties of English. Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:17:06AM via free access <UN> 50 R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 1.2. Preaspiration in Shetland That Shetland can be an interesting laboratory for language contact and his- torical (socio-)linguistics may be clear from this brief sketch of the islands’ linguistic history; what role the absence of preaspriation plays in this, is no doubt somewhat more obscure. Preaspiration is often described as an areal feature of Northwestern Europe, as it occurs in language spoken around the North Atlantic Ocean (Hansson, 2001). This makes that it is in fact thelack of preaspiration in Shetland, not the occurrence of the feature elsewhere, that needs to be explained. Hansson (2001: 158–159) only makes a brief mention of Shetland in his account of preaspiration, but his contribution highlights a range of important questions. I cite it here in its entirety: Preaspiration proper is found in all dialects of the Insular Scandinavian languages (Icelandic and Faroese). There is also reason to believe that it existed in Shetland Norn, the extinct language once spoken on the Shetland Islands, judging from transcriptions in Jakobsen (1921). It should be emphasized, however, that Jakobsen is not describing Norn as such, but the etymologically Norse vocabulary of the 19th century local dialect of Scots English. Since it is unlikely that these words had an entirely unique phonetic character, preaspiration (including sonorant devoicing) must have been a general feature of 19th century Shetland English. The crucial question is then whether this was in fact a direct carryover from Norn, or simply ‘imported’ to the islands as a feature of Scots English itself. (Many Scots dialects have preaspiration as a Gaelic substratum feature.) Which explanation is more plausible remains a matter of further investigation. In this paper, I aim to chart how preaspiration was constrained in Shetland Norn, as the language was recorded in Jakobsen’s transcriptions of Shetland Scots. This allows us to discover where this preaspiration came from — Shetland Norn, or Scottish Gaelic — and why it disappeared, as noted at the coffee table. I will also briefly touch upon a possible ‘unique phonetic character’ of the Norn words in Shetland Scots, and discuss the implications of historical linguistic research on substratum data. I begin by outlining some of the practical and theoretical considerations and assumptions made in this study (§2). I give a brief introduction to preaspi- ration, explain the theory of language contact assumed in this paper, and make some preliminary remarks about the reliability of substratum data. I then give a more detailed account of the constraints on preaspiration in a range of relevant languages (§3). The study of preaspiration in Shetland Norn is presented in §4, followed by a discussion of the implications of the results (§5). A brief conclusion (§6) addresses the issues from Hansson’s research program cited above. Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:17:06AM via free access <UN> R. Knooihuizen / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 48–72 51 2. Practical and Theoretical Considerations 2.1. Preaspiration The term ‘preaspiration’ is often used as an umbrella term for two phenomena that, following Hansson (2001: 157), will be referred to in this paper as ‘stop preaspiration’ and ‘sonorant devoicing’. Stop preaspiration involves a period of voicelessness typically before a voiceless stop; although the exact realisation varies, the canonical transcription is [hp ht hk]. In sonorant devoicing, a sonorant becomes voiceless when followed by a voiceless stop. Both stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing are cases of regressive voicing assimila- tion, where the voicelessness of the stop spreads to the preceding vowel (for stop preaspiration, resulting in [h]) or sonorant. Despite this similarity, however, the occurrence of and constraints on stop preaspiration and sonorant devoicing do not have to run in parallel. Preaspiration is cross-linguistically an extremely rare feature. Helgason (2002: 43–104) and Silverman (2003) give extensive