Fishing for words: the taboo language of Shetland fishermen and the dating of Norn language death

There has been considerable debate about when Norn, the Scandinavian language formerly spoken in Orkney and Shetland, died as a community language in the islands. Arguments thus far have focused primarily on second-hand commentary from travel and census reports, sparking disputes about the credibility of these sources. Linguistic evidence, although very little survives, is seldom used systematically in the debate about when Norn died. I argue that a list of thirty Norn words collected in 1774 can tell us about the state of the language at the time, and can thus be used as evidence in this debate.