The Norn language influences the variety of Lowland Scots spoken in Shetland today, in lexicon and grammar.
These works have been studied in depth, and scholars have notionally fixed the old Shetland Norn as kin to Faroese and Vestnorsk.
The first widely published writers were two daughters of the Lerwick gentry, Dorothea Primrose Campbell and Margaret Chalmers,[2] who wrote for the most part in a rather formal English.
Subsequent Shetland dialect writers such as Haldane Burgess,[1] James Stout Angus, George Stewart and Basil R Anderson helped forge the written form of the native tongue.
As a result, subsequent generations of Shetlanders have grown up unaware of this tradition – and specialist readers, the scholars beyond the islands who might be interested, remain oblivious to the work.