Sea Shanty - in Languages Other Than English

In Languages Other Than English

While the crews of merchant ships in which shanties were sung might have come from a wide variety of national and ethnic backgrounds and might have spoken various mother-tongues, the shanty genre was by and large an English-language phenomenon. However, non-English-language sailor work songs were also developed. They are generally of these types:

• Preexisting non-English-language songs from the popular or folk song traditions of a linguistic group, which were adapted to the shanty paradigm;
• Preexisting, original shipboard worksongs from non-English-speaking peoples, retrofitted to the definition of "shanty";
• Newly created non-English-language songs, designed to fit the established shanty paradigm;
• Translations of English shanties into other languages, often preserving their English choruses.

There are notable bodies of shanty repertoire in Swedish, Norwegian, Plattdeutsch, Standard German, Dutch, Flemish, French, and Welsh, and shanties have been translated into Polish. The terms for shanties in these languages do not always precisely correlate with English usage. In French, chant de marin or "sailor's song" is a broad category that includes both work and leisure songs. Swedish uses sjömansvisa, "sailor song," as a broad category, but tends to use the borrowed "shanty" to denote a work song. Similarly, Norwegian uses sjømannsvise as the broad category and the borrowed term sjanti (also spelled "shanty") or the native opsang for work songs. The equivalents in German are Seemannslied and, again, shanty. A shanty in Polish is szanty.

Substantial collections of non-English shanties include the following, which have been instrumental in forming the modern day sailor song repertoires of revival performers in their respective languages:

French

• Hayet, Capt. Armand: Chansons de Bord. Paris: Editions Eos (1927).

German

• Baltzer, R. and Klaus Prigge. “Knurrhahn”: Sammlung deutscher und englisher Seemannslieder und Shanties wie sie auf deutschen Segelschiffen gesungen wurden. Vol. 1, 2. Kiel: A. C. Ehlers (1935-6).

Norwegian

• Brochmann, H. Opsang fra Seilskibstiden. Christiania: Norske Förlags Kompani Ltd. (1916).

Swedish

• Sternvall, Sigurd. Sång under Segel. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag (1935).