Plaas wrote:As far as I know, Shetlandic is part of the greater English continuum. It is surprisingly English, compared to other West-Germanic languages: the plural suffix is -s, auxiliarys are [i[cood[/i] (could}, micht (might), wid (would), sood (should), there is only one definite article (da), the verb conjugation is practically the same (but "thou art" -> du is)... An interesting feature is ta be being the auxiliary instead of have: I'm written - I have written. But does that make it another language? I know the difference between language and dialect is not clear, but if one declares this a seperate language, the West Country Dialects or even Australian English would be seperate languages too, as would most Dutch dialects.
Well, as you mentioned, the divide between 'language' and 'dialect' is a hard one to define. The debate is currently over whether or not Lowland Scots is it's own language. Shetlandic is a dialect of Scots, and to me it makes an even better case for being a language than do other Scots dialects (Doric etc..). If we were to take mutual intelligibility as the main factor (something which, actually, many different 'languages' have, such as Swedish an Norwegian), then this 'dialect' certainly isn't fully intelligible to me. I'd say, when listening to it, it's about 60% mutually intelligible. That number would presumably go up if a speaker of Standard Scottish English was listening, but may well go down if someone else was listening. I think the real test would be to get English speakers who don't know any other Germanic languages and who know nothing about linguistics (and who are from nowhere near Shetland) to listen to it and see if they can understand.
Personally, I think people in the English speaking world aren't quite willing enough to call different speech varieties 'languages'. Look at the Nordic languages, they are all quite similar, but they are considered different languages. Now, here's where I may be getting myself into some trouble because I don't know the languages involved well, but how different are the Frisian Languages? How different are they from standard Dutch? Now consider how different Shetlandic is from Standard English. And as for other dialects of English being considered languages, you could well be right. The reason I like Shetlandic as a candidate for languagedom is that it is a variety of Scots, a type of speech that had been separate from mainstream English developments since Middle English (but which in recent years has become more anglicised), and that it then has a Norse substrate (Norn).