Old Norse in the North Highlands

Through my degree at the University of the Highlands and Islands, I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from native Norwegian speakers and people who can speak Old Norse, and hearing the language has helped me picture the people who once used it here. You begin to think about somebody calling across a field, talking to their children or having a disagreement with a neighbour. Guests are rarely surprised that Vikings reached northern Scotland, but the idea that they settled, farmed and raised families often comes as more of a discovery. Hearing their language brings those households a little closer, because you can begin to put conversations into the places they made their home.

Many of the settlers came from Norway, and if you’d been trying to feed a family on its rocky western coast, the agricultural land of Caithness might have looked rather promising. Along with their farming knowledge, they brought Old Norse, which became established wherever their households took root. In Orkney and Shetland, it developed into the local forms known as Norn, a name sometimes also used for the less well-documented Norse speech of Caithness. Modern Norwegian grew from the same Old Norse roots, so listening to the language through my studies gives me a connection with the people who looked across this landscape and decided they could make a living here.

That connection becomes all the more interesting once you realise how long the language lasted. There are reports of Norn speakers in eighteenth-century Orkney and evidence from Shetland in the same period, so people were still using it centuries after the Viking Age. As Scots became more prominent in public life, the older language could continue among family and neighbours, where a change of ruler didn’t necessarily change the words used over supper. Some Norse vocabulary remains in northern dialects today, while the place names preserve so much of it that they deserve an article of their own. I also hear similarities between the musical quality of some Caithness speech and voices across the water in Orkney, although an accent has a more complicated history than an individual word whose origins we can trace.

I had the chance to explore those connections with a professor fluent in Finnish and Norwegian who joined me on tour to deepen her understanding of the region’s Nordic history. As we travelled, she could bring her knowledge of languages to the places and communities I was showing her, and our conversation became an exchange from which we both learned. I found that enormously rewarding, particularly because my own interest had grown through listening to people who knew the language. Now I could contribute something in return by showing her the landscape in which an important part of its story had unfolded.

To learn more, book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.