Annarleg sprek á ókunnugri strönd. Tökuorð í íslensku fyrr og nú

Abstract

Lexical borrowings in Icelandic are the main topic of the article. Compared to many other languages, borrowings are relatively few in Icelandic, but their number is believed to be increasing in recent times due to increased language contact. We look at two periods in the history of the language — the 14th and 15th centuries characterised by Middle Low German influence in Northern Europe and modern times from the late 19th century till the present, especially last few decades, when linguistic influence typically comes from English. The Middle Low German influence was largely indirect in Iceland as it was transmitted through the Scandinavian languages, which were much more deeply influenced than Icelandic. In Icelandic documents before 1500 there are close to 3,000 examples of 500–600 different words of Middle Low German descent. About half of them only appear once or twice in the documents, and relatively few are still in use. In modern times the main linguistic influence was first from Danish and later, especially after World War II, from English. Recent studies of various texts from Modern Icelandic speech and writing have indicated that a very small proportion of the texts consists of lexical borrowings (less than 0.5% of running words on the average). They also show that the frequency of such words varies greatly according to genre, style and register — in newspapers, the percentage is e.g. almost 1% in advertisements while it is as low as 0.04% in editorials. Furthermore it has been shown that young people tend to use more borrowings from English than older persons, as might be expected from the fact that the young in general are more fluent in English. Many of the borrowed words only occur once in the texts, and presumably some of the less adapted words should rather be analysed as (more or less conscious) code switches than as actual borrowings. Others are more frequent, and they tend to be better adapted, orthographically, phonetically and/or grammatically. The discussion focuses mainly on the frequency and distribution of lexical borrowings in texts from the two periods, but their grammatical and semantic characteristics, as well as their development is also discussed briefly.