Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

A note on the Shaetlan translation:
The poem is a translation of Richard Berengarten’s poem ‘The death of children’. His poem is a villanelle, a demanding poetic structure incorporating repeated lines and having a strict aba rhyme- scheme. This was a challenge to translate into Shaetlan, which is a very ‘minority’ tongue with a relatively small vocabulary.

Shaetlan (or Shetlandic) is spoken in the Shetland Isles, the most northerly part of the UK. Recently it has been described by linguists as a ‘contact’ or ‘mixed’ language rather than as a ‘dialect’. This particular linguistic blend reflects its historic evolution from Scandinavian roots from around the 9th century (and the associated Norn language) until 1469, when Shetland became part of Scotland through a marriage alliance between a Danish princess and a Scottish prince. Norn was gradually pushed to the periphery by the Scots tongue, which was the language of domination: the courts, the church and the new land-owners. However, while Shetland Norn had died out completely by the mid-19th century, much of it was incorporated into the local variant of Scots which we call Shaetlan. It could be described as a blend of Old Scots and Norn.

Jakob Jakobsen, a Faroese scholar, visited Shetland to do fieldwork in the late 19th century and his resulting Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland (with over 10,000 words) was published in Danish (in four volumes, 1908-21) and later in two volumes in English in 1928 and 1932. Many of these words are still in use. Contemporary linguists still seem to find Shaetlan a fascinating subject of study – Peter Sundkvist and Viveka Velupillai, to name but two, have both published extensively on the subject.

Shaetlan differs from Standard English in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation and is arguably the most distinctive variant of Scots today, being particularly rich and onomatopoeic. Despite a sizeable and growing incomer population, Shaetlan is still spoken by probably about half the population. The total population in Shetland is approx. 20,000, all of whom speak English, since that remains the language of the classroom. Many now speak only English, especially incomers; and while they may come to understand spoken Shaetlan, they neither speak nor write it themselves. Many of the older diaspora speak Shaetlan.

In Shetland there has been more of a tradition of writing poetry than prose, possibly reflecting an oral ballad tradition. Early writers were James Stout Angus (1830–1923), Basil Anderson (1861–1888) and J. J. Haldane Burgess (1862–1927). They all chose to write in Shaetlan, although their education was in English. The 20th century gave us, among others: brother and sister, Jack Peterson (1895–1972) and Emily Milne (1904 –1970); T. A. Robertson (pen-name, Vagaland, 1909–1973); William Tait (1918-1992); Jack Renwick (1924–2010); Stella Sutherland (1924–2015); and Rhoda Bulter (1929–1994). There are many contemporary poets. Those writing in Shaetlan, and published beyond Shetland, include Christine De Luca (b. 1947), Robert Alan Jamieson (b. 1958) and Roseanne Watt (b. 1991). Themes, though often displaying their Shetland roots, range widely from the personal to the philosophical, the local to the universal.

Shetland has a relatively small but growing literature, much of it written in Shaetlan, and this is encouraging others to use it in their writing and messaging too. While the written form is still not uniform or agreed, it appears to be gradually standardising.