A traditional phonological inventory of Shetland and Orkney vowels will, naturally, categorize them as Scots/Scottish English (cf. Stuart-Smith, this volume). In his pilot study for the LSS, Catford (1957) argues that most accents in Shetland (along with Angus and parts of Perthshire and Kincardineshire, which is plausible from a demographic point of view) display the maximal Scots vowel system of twelve monophthongs and at least two diphthongs. The twelve-vowel system typically makes a distinction between e.g. bread and bred, sale and sell, where the latter in the pair is considerably more open.

Johnston, who is alone in having made a phonemic inventory of the LSS data, does not dispute Catford’s claims, but draws attention to a series of changes in Shetland and Orkney accents that he calls “the Insular Clockwise Vowel Shift, from the direction in which the nuclei move from the point of view of a conventional vowel chart” (Johnston 1997: 449).

This shift implies that Older Scots /a/ is reflected as [æ], /ε/ as [e] or [ei], /a:/ as [a: ~ æ:],  and  to . Further information from Johnston’s detailed inventory is included in the presentation of lexical sets below.

Tait (2000), also a discussion of LSS data and to some extent a critique of Johnston’s analysis, emphasizes the importance of “soft mutation” (his own term), by which he means qualitative changes in a number of Shetland vowels before certain consonants, predictable according to phonetic environment. He refers to allophones occurring typically before voiceless consonants as “hard” and those which occur typically before voiced consonants as “soft”. The BATH vowel, for example, is raised from /a/ to /æ/ before /d/. Tait views these systematic changes, in part, as an alternative and an addition to the concept of a clockwise vowel shift. He summarizes his analysis in a vowel table, which lists as many as fifteen contrastive vowel phonemes, six of which have length as “potentially contrastive”. Tait’s interesting vowel analysis is further considered in the presentation of lexical sets.

In her traditional study of Orkney phonology, Orten (1991) identifies twelve vowel phonemes in the accent of her main informant: nine monophthongs and three diphthongs, viz.  . A general finding by Orten is that the Kirkwall accent is heavily influenced by Standard Scottish English (StScE).

No attempt is made here to identify the number of contrastive vowel phonemes in Shetland or Orkney, however. As should be apparent from the above, such an inventory is very problematic, among other things for the following reasons:

– the wide span of the available speech continuum, from StScE to broad, traditional dialect on a Norse substratum;

– the considerable regional variation within the island communities;

– the striking effect of the phonetic environment as demonstrated by Tait

In connection with the last-mentioned point, a further complication is of course the effects of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR). This rule is described on Scottish English. As shown by van Leyden (2002), the SVLR is fairly strictly applied in Shetland dialect today, but less so in Orkney, which she ascribes to the influence of “Standard English”. The main research question for van Leyden, however, was to test the claim first made by Cat-ford that Shetland dialect retains a Scandinavian-like syllable structure, in that stressed monosyllables, when closed by a consonant, contain either a short vowel followed by a long consonant (VC:), as in back [bak:], or a long vowel followed by a short consonant (V:C), as in baulk [ba:k]. The results of the study, relying on instrumental analysis, basically confirmed this claim, also showing that it was particularly valid for traditional-dialect lexical items. The Orkney data, however, show that there “this particular relic of Norn has apparently been lost because of the strong influence of mainland Scots dialects” (van Leyden 2002: 15).

Catford (1957: 73) points out that most of the Scandinavian-based features in Shetland phonology have to do with consonants. He ascribes it to the fact that the Norn speakers “had a smaller ‘repertoire’ of consonants than the incomers, and failed to acquire some of the essential consonantal distinctions of Scots”. In addition to the existence of long consonants (geminates), there are, indeed, other interesting systematic characteristics. In Shetland as well as Orkney (though not mentioned in Orten 1991), there is a categorical palato-alveolar affricate merger to the effect that a word pair such as gin and chin is homophonous, realized as .

Another feature affecting the phonemic inventory is th-stopping, occasionally found in Orkney dialect, but categorical in Shetland accents, unless adapted to outsiders, i.e. towards the StScE end of the continuum. The familiar form of address, for example, is represented as thu or thoo in Orkney dialect writing, but as du in Shetland. Th-stopping has also taken place in mainland Scandinavia, but after the end of Viking rule in the Northern Isles. Hence it might be due to an independent innovation and/or to the never-ceasing close contact with Norway.

The realization of initial <wh> as in wheel and <kn> as in knee also deserves mention in this context. In Shetland, initial <wh> is usually [M], but in some regions, notably the west side of Shetland mainland, the outlying islands of Foula and Papa Stour and some pockets on the east side, it is realized as [kw], even in lexical items such as whole. Hypercorrections are common in these accents, e.g. [hwin] for queen. Similar realizations are believed to have existed in Orkney, but there is no evidence in present-day speech (Marwick 1929). Initial /kn/ clusters are recessive in Shetland, but can still be heard in the speech of some older speakers realized as a voiceless velar nasal followed by [n]. A better-known variant, very lexically restricted, is characterized by enforced articulation of [k], sometimes followed by an epenthetic vowel. In dialect writing, this variant is often represented as k-n as in k-nee. This pronunciation is something of a stereotype and is particularly well known from an old phrase, denoting the simple Shetland fare in the old days, kale and knockit corn, where the force of alliteration obviously plays a part as well.

In Orkney, retroflex, “Scandinavian-like” realizations of /r/ + /s/ as  in final position are the rule rather than the exception, i.e. in words such as force, nurse, incomers, tours.