Muddy Bay Diaries (4)

Friday daytime
The conference was opened with a nice little introductory talk by Brian Smith. A couple of funny anecdotes with the necessary mention of Famous Shetlanders of Yore to give the conference just that little bit of extra prestige. The first proper talk was by Marianna Debes Dahl, on the life of Jakob Jakobsen (the guy the conference was all about) and what could be read from the letters he sent and received during his life. I think we got the full inventory of what letters he sent to whom, where and about what. This didn’t bode well for the conference. The seats in the Scalloway lecture theatre have very little leg room. How on earth am I going to survive these two days?

Fortunately Marianna’s talk took a turn for the better and she made the interesting point that Jakobsen, who is credited with a lot of the success of language status planning efforts in the Faroes, wrote all his correspondence in Danish or English, and zilch (well, only one letter) in Faroese. An article I read a while ago made the same point for the people behind the literary revivals of Catalan, Welsh and a number of other minority languages. So what’s going on there?

Two of the speakers admitted that their first visit to Shetland was to do with knitting, before they even had an idea there was once a Scandinavian language there or this odd Faroese guy who wrote a dictionary of the language ages after it died. And knitting was still enormously prevalent also at the conference. Two delegates were knitting during the talks, and one was doing crocheting. There was already talk about organizing a pan-Scandinavian knitting conference.

I can’t possibly remember all the talks that were given at the conference, so feel free to read the proceedings when they finally come out. The proceedings from the 2004 Shetland dialect conference were available in the foyer and they make for an interesting read, if only because half the articles are written in Shetland dialect in various spellings. Reading it out loud to yourself is the only way to go.

The cold buffet we got for dinner was only marginally acceptable. It was very very fishy, and there were scary crab things, and the small chicken things they had were gross (I managed to eat a bit of one before deciding it was a bad idea to continue) so the only thing that was vaguely edible was some wrap thing with undeterminable filling.

I should mention Doreen’s lecture on the Friday night. A public lecture on just some random words from Jakobsen’s dictionary of Shetland Norn. Random in the sense that she chose them because she had special memories connected to them, or because they just sounded funny. The most interesting thing here was that her slides with random words that no one in Shetland knew anymore caused the Faroese part of the audience to start ooh-ing and aah-ing because they recognized so many of them. Especially sparl (Fø. sperðil) seemed popular. This is basically haggis but not made in the sheep’s stomach but a couple of stages further along the metabolism route.

Friday night
Late Friday evening was spent in the hotel. I didn’t really speak to anybody, but sat in the lounge of the hotel reading my own article again (on which my lecture for Saturday was based) and later the book that I bought at Edinburgh Airport on my way to Shetland. Everybody should read Spoken here: travels among threatened languages by Mark Abley. I also talked to Sanna a bit.

Saturday morning
For some reason everyone woke up extremely early throughout the conference. In this case I had finished breakfast shortly after 8am, and with the bus not coming until 9.30 there was plenty of time again to explore. I had been told by Klaske (the only other Dutch person at the conference and with a lot of background knowledge on Orkney and Shetland) that there were seals in Brei Wick, the bay behind the hotel, possibly with the extra tourist attraction of authentic Shetland neds throwing rocks at them because they eat the fish. I missed out on the neds, but there were plenty of seals on various rocks in the bay.


At some point I seemed very far away from the hotel and it started to drizzle a bit so I decided to walk back. Distances are a lot shorter than they seem (plus I didn’t go back climbing over rocks like I did on the way out) and the weather changes every five minutes anyway, so by the time I got back to the hotel ten minutes later, we were all bathing in sunlight again.