Introduction: language contact and language shift

With sufficient perspective, the linguistic history of northern Scotland and the Northern Isles is one where, on a number of occasions, the inhabitants have changed languages, although what these languages were has differed from region to region. Therefore, to understand many of the distinctive features of these dialects, we need to understand how the inter-related phenomena of language contact and language shift work upon the variety speakers are shifting to.

Language shift has always happened. When we look at the Mediterranean basin today, we can see that many languages, such as Gaulish, Etruscan or Punic, whose speakers wielded considerable power, are no longer spoken. In their place are languages associated with political power and cultural uniformity, such as Latin and its Romance daughters or Turkish, languages associated with an all-pervasive ideology, such as Arabic, or languages associated with immigration, such as the Slavonic languages.

If these processes can be illustrated for areas with a lengthy recorded history, it would be perverse to suggest the opposite for areas less well reported, such as those discussed here.

Sasse (1992) provides a model for what happens when one language dies, and another takes its place. How does transfer from one language to another affect the language of the transferring community? How does it affect the language of those who speak the target language?