Shetland had been settled by a
Celtic-speaking population by the time the Western Norse expansion started in the late 8th century. The majority seems to have belonged to the
Pictish linguistic and cultural sphere, but it is possible that there were also
Gaelic speaking
Christian missionaries on the islands when the first Norse seafarers arrived. Exactly when this was is debated, but evidence suggests that the first settlements were as early as about 790–800 AD. It is also not known what happened to the pre-Norse population. Suggestions have been made that Shetland was completely depopulated in the catastrophic climate events of the mid-6th century, though this is debated. Shetland, together with
Orkney and
Caithness, was incorporated into the
Kingdom of Norway in 875 as the
Earldom of Orkney. However, in 1195 Shetland was placed directly under the rule of the
Norwegian king and was made a tributary province to Norway, paying tax directly to the Norwegian king and ruled by the king's
sysselman ('governor'). This meant that Shetland's links with Orkney gradually diminished, although they
shared a bishop and remained closer linked in the clerical domain. The linguistic ecology of Shetland and Orkney gradually continued to diverge for two main reasons. First, the Earldom of Orkney had been settled by a Scots speaking population from the middle of the 14th century. Second, there was an intense presence of the
Hanseatic and
Dutch North Sea fishing trade in Shetland (linking it with
Bergen,
Iceland and the
Faroe islands), bringing with it an intense and sustained contact with Dutch and Low Germanic speakers in the
late medieval and
early modern period, whereas there was much less of a Low Germanic trade presence in Orkney during these centuries. This trade contact was not only long drawn, but also intense as well as steady, with numerous Hanseatic
trading stations dotted all over Shetland. Some of these trading stations were large enough to resemble small settlements, and were inhabited for weeks, sometimes months, and sometimes over the entire winter. This contact would continue until the French and
Napoleonic wars, and nearly seamlessly move from Hanseatic trade to the Dutch fishing trade. It was especially the trade for
knitwear which made the Dutch fishing fleet arrive in the hundreds. This is also what gave rise to the town of
Lerwick. Lowland Scots speakers increasingly started settling in Shetland from the early 15th century onwards, especially in the southern areas of Shetland. The settlers were predominantly connected to the
clergy, but were also landowners, administrators, traders and craftsmen. Lowland Scots increasingly established itself in Shetland in a socioeconomic top-down spread. Shetland came under Danish rule with the
union of Norway and Denmark in 1380. In 1468
Christian I of Denmark pawned Orkney to
James III of Scotland as part of the
dowry for
Princess Margaret, then subsequently pawned Shetland in May 1469 as the second part of the dowry. There was a gradual administrative shift to Scottish rule, and the Lowlands Scots settlement also gradually increased. But Shetland remained a multilingual place, as reported by contemporary testimonies: The "Commerce with the Hollanders" mentioned in the quote above refers to the intense trade for knitwear mentioned above. Norn gradually declined, but remained spoken in Shetland at least until the early 19th century, if not later. Shetland would thus have been bilingual until at least then, but it is likely that it was a displacive contact situation, since Scots was the language of the new power holders. Archival evidence indicates that law and administrative officials in Orkney were unable and/or unwilling to recognise the speech of the local population; various documented complaints indicate that this kind of unwillingness and contempt on the part of the ruling class also occurred in Shetland. The last known speaker of Norn is usually named as
Walter Sutherland of
Skaw in
Unst (born , died . However, living memory names Jane Ratter (born , died ) of
Foula as a
rememberer of Norn songs, verses and riddles, and names her mother, Janet Manson (born , died ) as the last known person who used Norn conversationally. living testimony states that Janet Manson would speak it with one of her neighbours, an unnamed man. However, Janet and her neighbour did not call their language "Norn", but
Danska Tonga.
Status as a mixed language The long drawn and stable multilingualism between the 15th and 18th centuries resulted in the distinct blend that would become the pre-English language now spoken in Shetland. The fact that it arose in a specific contact situation by definition makes it a Contact Language. Specifically, it aligns with a prototypical G-L Mixed Language. It aligns with Bakker's 2017 model, which proposes that G-L languages will have the bulk of their grammar from the language of the original settlers and the bulk of their lexicon from the language of the new, more
socioeconomically dominant settlers: in a cluster
dendrogram the grammar of the language is near-identical to contemporary
Continental Scandinavian grammar, while a
phylogenetic network of the
Swadesh 100-list of shows the language on the
Anglian branch, but much more removed than Scots and English are from each other. The vocabulary is thus more heterogenous than the grammar. == Phonology ==