From Starafjall to Starling Hill - Scottish Place-Name Society

1. Introduction
Chapter 1. Introduction
This book contains an investigation of the formation and development
of Orkney place-names in the Old Norse and Scots periods in
Orkney. It is based on the study of place-names in four Orkney parishes
for my master and doctoral theses (Sandnes 1996 and 2003).
The development of Orkney place-names in this period depends
fundamentally on the interaction of the two contact languages. Our
first task, then, is to give an outline of the actual contact situation –
the socio-political and sociolinguistic setting. This is done in chapter
2. Secondly, we need a description of the two contact languages.
This is not as straightforward as it might seem, as the actual languages
in contact were hardly standard variants. A short presentation
of the contact languages and major developments of the two is given
in chapter 4. Ch. 3 is an overview of former research.
The actual place-name material is presented in chapter 6, along
with suggested interpretations and other information.
The remaining chapters explore features of the formation and
development of Orkney place-names from a more principal point of
view. First of all, it is important to decide which names are Old
Norse formations and which are Scots. This is problematic for a
number of reasons, most importantly because nearly all the written
sources for place-names are in the Scots language. The two languages
are quite closely related and the dividing lines become even
more blurred during the prolonged bilingual period, when a number
of Old Norse appellatives and proper nouns are borrowed into Scots.
These borrowed linguistic elements are all adapted to Scots in different
ways. The first part of chapter 7 is an attempt to establish
criteria for distinguishing between Old Norse and Scots formations.
It goes on to treat various kinds of patterns and analogy in name
formation and finally, the assumption that colonial names are particularly
stereotypical is tested on the Orkney material.
Finally, I am interested in the development of place-names, and
in the language contact aspect in particular. A place-name is coined
7