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鈥淚 didna know if I should wash her or burn her!鈥� I heard this said the other day, and no; it was not said about a witch, but about a chair which had got dirty. Why is the chair a 鈥渉er鈥�? I have been lucky enough to get the opportunity to explore this question, along with other questions about the Orkney and Shetland dialects, as part of a project I am doing through the Arts and Humanities Research Council鈥檚 Connected Communities programme. The project is called the Orkney and Shetland Dialect Corpus Project, and I am collecting texts that are written in these dialects in order to use them in research. I was also fortunate enough to be asked to speak about my research at the 鈥淰oices Aroond the Islands 鈥� Past, Present and Future鈥� seminar day organised by the Orkney International Science Festival and Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership Scheme last Saturday. This is a shortened version of what I said there.

While collecting dialect texts, I observed that objects can be referred to as 鈥渉e鈥� or 鈥渟he鈥� rather than 鈥渉id鈥� (it). This seemed very unusual when compared to Standard English, but not at all unusual when compared to my native tongue Norwegian, in which all nouns have a gender. Many languages indeed have grammatical gender as a feature of their noun system, including our neighbours Gaelic, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese. English is quite unusual among the European languages for not having it. However, Old English did have grammatical gender. It has just been lost somewhere along the way. I therefore set up some hypotheses for myself, which I wanted to check: Could the rudimentary signs of a grammatical gender system in Orkney and Shetland have been (1) carried over from Norn? Or (2) carried over from Old English via older Scots? Or (3) have anything to do with Gaelic? Or (4) be idiosyncratic altogether?

The fact that gender is a feature of the dialect is commented on in the grammars, such as Hugh Marwick鈥檚 Orkney Norn and T. A. Robertson and John Graham鈥檚 Grammar and Usage of the Shetland Dialect. Marwick observes that weather and time phenomena are spoken of in the masculine, while fish are generally referred to as feminine. He then adds that 鈥淸i]n general, concrete objects, e.g. gun, nail, &c., are spoken of as feminine, and that is very common even yet鈥� (Marwick 1929: xxx). Robertson and Graham describe the situation in Shetland dialect as follows: 鈥淐ommon Nouns are either Masculine, Feminine or Neuter. Nouns which are Neuter in English are often Masculine or Feminine. The following are among those usually considered to be Masculine: aer, steid, schair, spade, sun. [鈥�] A smaller number are usually Feminine, including: lamp, fish, kirk, m枚n, wirld.鈥� There are of course neutral nouns as well (鈥渉id鈥�/it), both in Orkney and Shetland and in Old Norse and Old English. However, in fairly modern texts one can never be sure if the instances of 鈥渉id鈥�/it are traditional or if they have been influenced by Standard English.

In order to investigate these observations around grammatical gender further, I used prose fiction written in Orkney dialect, spanning in time from Walter Traill Dennison鈥檚 story 鈥淲hy the Hoose o鈥� Hellsness was Brunt鈥�, from his collection The Orcadian sketch-book : being traits of old Orkney life written partly in the Orkney dialect, published in 1880, to Christina Costie鈥檚 short story collection The Collected Orkney Dialect Tales of C.M. Costie, published 1976 but written in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. For comparison, I also used the Shetland texts Eels (James Stout Angus, poem, 1877); Auld Maunsie鈥檚 Cr眉 (Basil Ramsay Anderson, poem, 1888); and Shadowed Valley (John Graham, novel, with Shetland dialect dialogue, 1987).

Having been through these texts and picked out all instances of 鈥渟he/her鈥� or 鈥渉e/him鈥� or indeed 鈥渉id鈥� where Standard English would have 鈥渋t鈥�, I observed that Marwick is right in saying that concrete objects predominantly seem to be assigned the feminine gender in the Orkney texts. For example: 鈥淗ae, boy, there's dee thee gun. Thu'll need tae tak' care; mind sheu's half barral fu' o' leed, an' sal gin sheu spleets thu'll get warm haffits, I'se be boond鈥� (Walter Traill Dennison); or 鈥淢e teeble wis a lovely sight whin sheu wis set鈥� (Christina Costie). I only found one example from Orkney of the masculine gender: 鈥淎n' abeun de yett wus a bonnie square free-steen wi' letters cuttid on him 'at nee bodie could read鈥� (Walter Traill Dennison).

In Shetland, however, the situation is the reverse. Here, the masculine gender dominates, while the examples of feminine objects are in the minority: 鈥淚 hae ta lead da coo an cerry Granny's shair. Come an gie me a haand wi him鈥� (a chair, John Graham); 鈥淲ir been here i dis hoose for near on fifty year noo - an I'm wae ta laeve him鈥� (John Graham); and interestingly contradicting his own statement in the grammar book that 鈥渒irk鈥� is feminine: 鈥淲as der mony at da Kirk? Yae, as full as I'm seen him for a braa start noo鈥� (John Graham). One can observe the productive formation of gender assignment in the two dialects if one looks at words that are newer than Old Norse and Old English. For example, when 鈥減eat鈥� is feminine, as in 鈥淣oo sheu teuk the paet and breuk her i鈥� t鈥檙ee and set the pieces gently on the coals鈥� (Christina Costie), we know that the gender can鈥檛 have been carried over from Old Norse or Old English because the word doesn鈥檛 exist in these languages. The Oxford English Dictionary says 鈥淥rigin unknown; perhaps a borrowing of an unattested Pictish or British word, perhaps the same Celtic base as the suggested etymon of post-classical Latin petia: piece.鈥� So the etymology is really foggy, and the word doesn鈥檛 enter into the English language until the Middle English period, when the gender system had been lost. Nonetheless, when it comes to Orkney, it gets assigned the feminine gender, as that seems to be the default here. Similarly, when a chair is masculine in Shetland (as in 鈥淕ranny's shair鈥�), we can see that masculine is the default there because the word 鈥渃hair鈥� also entered into English in the Middle English period, and ultimately derives from Latin 鈥渃athedra鈥�, which is also why many Orcadians pronounce 鈥渃hair鈥� with two syllables 鈥� as 鈥渃hayer鈥�. This is closer to the older pronunciation.

Why this contrast between Orkney and Shetland? If it were carried over from Old Norse via Norn, should Orkney and Shetland not have the same gender assignments for these nouns? Trying to get to the bottom of it once and for all, I made a big table of all the nouns I found which also exist in Old Norse, along with their gender in the Orkney/Shetland texts and their Old Norse gender. In total, 14 out of 32 dialect words turned out to match their Old Norse gender. If the gender assignment had been random, one would expect a strike rate of about 0.33. The strike rate here is 0.44. Although slightly higher, it is not enough to conclude that there is a genuine retention of Old Norse genders in the dialects.

How about Old English, then?  I did the same test for matching the dialect words up to Old English, but the strike rate here was even lower: 0.35, which is almost exactly the one-third one would expect if it was completely random.

Regarding the Gaelic hypothesis, I couldn鈥檛 check in this way because I don鈥檛 speak Gaelic and I don鈥檛 know enough about the language to find out which words have Gaelic cognates. I would be very grateful if a Gaelic speaker could help me with this. I must point out, though, that Gaelic was never spoken in Orkney or Shetland except by single individuals or families who might have come to the Northern Isles from Gaelic speaking areas. That said, I believe that although Gaelic has never been a community language here, there must always have been an underlying presence of bilingual speakers 鈥� even Norse earls such as Thorfinn the Mighty had Gaelic family connections. However, if the gender system in Orkney and Shetland has anything to do with Gaelic, it could also be that it resembles the kind of English or Scots spoken in Gaelic or ex-Gaelic areas. Pursuing this thought, it is interesting to note that 鈥渉ighlanders are fond of the feminine pronoun for all genders鈥� (Grant and Dixon, Manual of modern Scots, 1921, p. 98). Perhaps the Orkney dialect鈥檚 generalisation of the feminine pronoun to almost all concrete objects could have something to do with the same tendency in the Highlands? This explanation does, however, leave the Shetland dialect鈥檚 tendency to generalise the masculine pronoun to most concrete objects unexplained. Do we have to settle for hypothesis four: It is idiosyncratic altogether?

There is one thing, however, which evidence suggests is Old Norse. And that is the fact that weather phenomena, and also tide, seasons and time, are masculine in Orkney, as for example in 鈥淣oo he was a sooth-aesterly gale鈥� (C. Costie). The masculine gender contrasts with the feminine default. I know from Norway that many dialects there also speak of weather in the masculine. A forthcoming article by Eriksen, Kittil盲 and Kolehmainen says that speaking of weather in the masculine is characteristic of Icelandic, Faroese and some Mainland Scandinavian dialects.

The genders of the sun and moon can also be a tell-tale. The modern English poetic usage when personifying the sun and moon has taken up the French or Romance gender for sol (masculine) and luna (feminine), instead of retaining the Germanic grammatical genders where the sun is feminine and the moon masculine. If the Orkney and Shetland dialects had inherited these genders from Norn, one would expect them to follow the Old Norse genders: s贸l (鈥榮un鈥�, fem) and m谩ni (鈥榤oon鈥�, masc.). Marwick says in Orkney the moon in masculine. However, this may be because the moon can be seen as an aspect of time, tides or weather. In Shetland, Robertson and Graham have the moon listed as feminine.  The Shetland and Orkney dialects therefore have different genders for the moon, which means that if the fact that the moon in masculine in Orkney dialect is to be seen as a retention of the Old Norse or Old English gender, it implies that the gender of the moon must have changed in the Shetland dialect at some later point in time, possibly under influence of poetic usage in English.  What about the sun? While Marwick doesn鈥檛 give the gender of the sun in the Orkney dialect, Robertson and Graham say that the sun is masculine in the Shetland dialect. The Shetland dialect therefore seems to follow the general modern English poetic practice, while the Orkney dialect differs in referring to the moon as masculine in line with Old Norse.

In conclusion, while the grammatical gender system in Orkney and Shetland does neither follow that of Old Norse nor of Old English, there is reason to believe that assigning the masculine gender to weather phenomena is something which has been carried over from Norn. And perhaps also the very idea that nouns have genders has been retained, even if the genders themselves have not. Perhaps it developed into an identity marker which set the Orkney and Shetland dialects apart from other Scottish dialects.