SOUK Yesterday was St Magnus Day, patron saint of Orkney, which put me in mind of this week’s word. Ever since Scotland emerged at the end of what scholars no longer call “the Dark Ages”, it has been a multilingual nation. A time-traveller visiting what is now Scotland around the year 1000 would encounter speakers of Old Northumbrian in the south-east, of Celtic varieties across large swathes of the country, and of Old Norse (Norroen or “Norn”), the language of the Vikings, in the far north and dotted around the coast and islands. Shetland and Orkney, in particular, were settled by many Norse speakers, as recorded in the Old Icelandic Orkneyinga saga, the earliest manuscript-witness of which survives from the 14th century. Native speakers of Orkney Norn were still to be encountered in the late eighteenth century, and present-day Orkney Scots retains many Norn-derived forms. One such word is souk.