Memorial lecture in honour of scholar James Stout Angus

A MEMORIAL lecture will be held next weekend in honour of poet, lexicographer and place name scholar James Stout Angus.

The annual Shetland Museum and Archives lecture takes place on Friday 18 November at the Hay’s Dock-based museum and will be given by Viveka Velupillai, honorary professor of the English department at the Justus Liebig University Giessen – a leading public research university in Germany.

Her lecture is entitled ‘Lönabracks and affrugs of contact and change: A typological study of pre-oil Shetland dialect’.

A number of studies have shown evidence of an ongoing shift from Shetland dialect to standard English, especially in and around Lerwick.

The common view is that this has been triggered by demographic changes related to the wider effects of the oil industry. Yet to date there has been no in-depth description of the language spoken before these demographic changes for comparison with the current state of the language.

Viveka’s talk will show how Shetland fits in a larger context of “contact languages” and “contact linguistics”. She will discuss how the oral history recordings in the Shetland Museum and Archives can be used in a so-called “apparent time” study to represent pre-oil language data.

She will show how the data is analysed using a standard typological approach appropriate for any language in the world.

Viveka will also bring up some features of pre-oil Shetland dialect which currently seem to be eroding. She will place these features within the context of linguistic typology, which studies global linguistic patterns, showing that pre-oil Shetland exhibits a number of interesting features.

James Stout Angus was a native of Nesting who was born in 1830 and died in 1923. He was a carpenter and poet whose works included Echoes from Klingrahool. He was also a lexicographer and place name scholar.

The lecture is being held in conjunction with Shetland ForWirds and the Centre for Nordic Studies.

• Tickets to the lecture on Friday 18 November are available now, priced £3.50, from www.thelittleboxoffice.com/smaa or from the Museum and Archives reception on (01595) 741562.  Doors open at 6.30pm for a 7pm start.