The Bressay stone (Bressay, Shetland, ca. 900) bears an Ogham inscription showing Pictish and Old Norse language side by side.Moody Heddle & Mainland, 1920, p. 151. The two languages may have co-existed for a while, but the Norse culture quickly asserted dominance. Norwegian annals indicate that any natives were long gone by the 12th century.Nordbø, 2022.

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The Bressay stone (Bressay, Shetland, ca. 900) bears an Ogham inscription showing Pictish and Old Norse language side by side.

History of written Norn

Perhaps the earliest example of written Norn is a greeting recorded in 1529 in Descriptio Insularum Orchadiarum (A Description of the Orcadian Islands): goand da boundæ. The first part corresponds to the Icelandic or Faroese góðan dag, “good day”.Barnes, 2009, p. 28.

Though the existence of a language on the northern islands is well attested, the next known recording is not until the late 1690s – the Lord’s Prayer in Orkney Norn is included in the second edition of James Wallace’s Account of the Islands of Orkney.Ibid.

The Hildina Ballad is one among very few surviving continuous texts. It was recorded by the Scottish minister George Low on the island of Foula, Shetland in 1774, along with the Lord’s Prayer and a list of thirty words. Low’s manuscript was first published in 1805, in Rev. George Barry’s History of the Orkney Islands.Steintún, 2016, p. 16.

Scholarly interest

A Lerwick-born merchant, Arthur Laurenson, wrote about the “language of the Islands Shetland” for the Danish periodical Annaler for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie in 1860. His article is accompanied by an analysis of some extant Norn texts by Danish philologist K. J. Lyngby.Barnes, 2009, pp 31–32.

Furthermore, Thomas Edmondston’s Etymological Glossary of the Shetland and Orkney Dialect (1866) incorporates dialectal studies by William Grant, another Shetlander. In 1892, George Stewart published Shetland Fireside Tales, partly written in the Shetland dialect.Ibid.

The latter two served as important inspiration for the Faroese philologist Jakob Jakobsen, before his arrival on Shetland in 1893. Jakobsen recorded some 10 000 Norn words, and published three works on the language: Det norrøne sprog på Shetland (his doctoral thesis of 1897), Shetlandsøernes stednavne (1901, in English translation 1936) and Etymologisk ordbog over det norrøne sprog på Shetland (1908–21, English translation 1928–32).Store norske leksikon, 2005–07.

Following in the footsteps of Jakobsen, the Scottish scholar Hugh Marwick’s The Orkney Norn (1929) catalogs roughly 3000 words from the Orkney dialect.Marwick, 1929.

Death and possible revival

When the language was first recorded in writing in the 1700s, it was clear that it had diverged significantly from the Old Norse in its isolation, displaying also Faroese and Scots influence. By this time, Norn was already waning and being gradually replaced by Scots after Shetland and Orkney was transferred from Norwegian to Scottish ownership in 1468–69.Nordbø, 2022.

According to Jakob Jakobsen, the Norn language died in 1850 with its last known speaker, Walter Sutherland of Unst.Jakobsen, 1928, p. XIX. In The Study of Norn, Michael Barnes casts doubt on Jakobsen’s claim, arguing that “any mention of Norn after at least 1800 describes a dead language”.Barnes, p. 41.

Active since 2006, Nynorn is an attempt to revitalize the Norn language, but beyond their website it has proven hard to find additional information about the project.The Nynorn project, n.d.