Walter Sutherland (Norn)

Walter Sutherland (died c. 1850) was a Scottish man who was reportedly the last native speaker of Norn, a North Germanic language which had once been spoken throughout Shetland, Orkney and Caithness.[1][2] Sutherland was from Skaw, on the island of Unst and lived in the northernmost house in the British Isles, near the present-day Unst Boat Haven.[3]

Sutherland may, however, have been merely the last native speaker of Norn on Unst. Some unnamed Norn-speakers of the island of Foula were reported by Jakob Jakobsen to have survived much later than the middle of the 19th century.[4]

Notes
  1. North-western European language evolution: NOWELE, vols. 50-51 (Odense University Press, 2007), p. 240
  2. Area Guide Unst
  3. June Skinner Sawyers, Maverick guide to Scotland (2000), p. 557
  4. P. Sture Ureland, George Broderick, eds., Language contact in the British Isles: proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Language Contact in Europe, Douglas, Isle of Man, 1988 (M. Niemeyer, 1991), p. 455
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