More recently, standard English has made substantial inroads and Dr Velupillai gave many examples of how the Shetland dialect has been changing. Today, she suggested, the English ‘th’ sound seems to be supplanting the d and t sounds common in Shetland dialect. A question such as ‘does du mind [remember] da day?’ may nowadays be heard as ‘do you mind the day?). Forms such as ‘I am written’ are tending to change to ‘I have written’. We may also hear more people say ‘it’s raining’ rather than ‘he’s raining’ – something that seemingly occurs only in western Scandinavia, Shetland, Faroe and Iceland. Dr Velupillai feels that these changes are more audible in Lerwick and among younger people.
In order to try to understand how the dialect has been changing, Dr Velupillai has been analysing recordings of older Shetlanders held in the Shetland Archives. As members of the audience pointed out, in earlier generations the exclusion of Shetland dialect from schools was a major contributor to the decline. It did survive outside school; but as the mass media arrived in Shetland, Shetlanders were exposed to standard English in their homes. In particular, many would say that the introduction of television in 1964 accelerated the erosion of dialect thereafter.
From the mid-1970s, the arrival of many new inhabitants to support the growing oil industry also seems likely to have increased the pressure on the dialect; the islands’ population rose by around 30% in a decade.