“There’s not one single word in the English language that describes that muscle fatigue you feel after exertion, but Shetland has five'
The launch of an interactive online dictionary for Shaetlan, the language which predates English on the Shetland archipelago, looks set to act as a model for other vulnerable languages across the world.
Native Shaetlan speaker and software developer James Stewart told the Sunday National he came up with the idea after noticing differences in the way his two grandmothers speak. “There’s not one single word in the English language that describes that muscle fatigue you feel after exertion, but Shetland has five. If that kind of difference isn’t recorded, it won’t be possible to record it in 10 years.”
“If we wait for professional linguists to produce proper dictionaries, half our languages [Papua New Guinea had 851 according to this year’s count] will be extinct before we can get started,” Volker added. Velupillai stressed that Da Spaektionary does not only list words which are unique to Shaetlan, but instead provides a “snapshot of contemporary speech” on the archipelago.
What’s more, Da Spaektionary is only expected to grow further, as the Shaetlan-speaking community is being encouraged to help “enhance and enlarge” it. This should give people a “sense of community ownership of the language”, Velupillai said.Submissions to the dictionary will also be mapped, creating a “more nuanced picture of the rich and colourful Shaetlan language than has been available before”.
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