Z is for Zetland and Zuill (wait, what?)

You might be reading this and asking what? Zetland -where’s that? It’s actually the traditional spelling for Shetland (to this day, Shetland postcodes all begin with ZE). And Zuill? It’s a variant rendering of Yuill. And the famous Scottish surname Menzies is not pronounced, as you might think, “men-zays”, but “ming-is”.

What is going on?, you might ask. Scots pronunciation can be notoriously unpredictable on occasion, particularly when it comes to placenames. To get an idea, how would you pronounce the following:

• Milngavie
• Anstruther
• Footdee
• Kilconquhar
• Culzean

Unless you’re Scottish or familiar with these places, chances are fairly good you’ll have got at least one of them wrong. The last, though, is actually effectively a consequence of a misreading. Scots used a letter – yogh, Ȝ – no longer in use in modern English. In Middle Scots, the written letter was often indistinguishable from a cursive z, and early Scots printers often used a z in its place. The yogh was akin to the effect of i in onion, or billion (when pronounced with two syllables). By the start of the Modern Scots period (roughly from 1700 on), the yogh had been replaced by a z in written Scots, and the –nz– had taken on the pronunciation roughly akin to –ng (as in “ring” in English).

This is just one of the many features of Scots that English-speakers will find unusual. There are many other peculiarities of spelling, pronunciation and vocabulary that you may come across when researching your family history. Should you find a word you don’t recognise, and think might be Scots, the best place to look is the Dictionary of the Scots Language.

​Footnote: In case you were wondering, the placenames listed above are pronounced
Mill-guy, Enster (or Ainster), Fittie, Kin-uch-er, and Cull-ain