Language development and social changes in late 19th-century Iceland

Language use in family letters

Abstract

The article presents the results of a small investigation into the effects of external factors and social changes on language use and language development in late 19th- and early 20th-century Iceland. The main focus is on the effects of increasing social and geographical mobility, including urbanisation and more widespread language contact, especially Danish, among the population, as well as the impact of contemporary efforts to standardise the written language. The standardisation (or „language reform“ as it was referred to at the time) had clear undertones of purism, appearing e.g. in preferring variants attested in medieval texts rather than younger – and in some cases dominant – variants in the comtemporary language, and in its opposition to foreign language influence, e.g. lexical borrowings. The main source for the investigation is a selection of family letters from 1878–1905, 69 a total, written by five individuals of the same generation (born 1856–1865), two sisters and two brothers, as well as one half-sister. There are similarities and contrasts within this group of writers: all were of approximately the same age, and most of them shared the same residence and social background, at least in their youth. On the other hand, there were differences in gender and education (brothers vs sisters), in their upbringing in urban vs rural surroundings, as well as in the southern vs northern part of the country (full siblings vs half-sister), and in the degree of contact with other languages (brothers vs sisters; full sisters vs half-sister). Two language features were investigated. First, the distribution of variants regarding the present singular of the verb hafa ‘have’, where some intellectuals promoted the use of older forms hefi (1st person) and hefir (2nd and 3rd person) rather than the contemporary and more widespread hef and hefur, even if this choice was not undisputed. Second, the relative frequency of lexical borrowings in the letters was investigated, as well as the type of borrowings used by the individual writers. In this case, there were clearly two opposite forces at play: on the one hand, rejection of foreign language influence in the emerging standard, and on the other hand, increasing foreign contacts, especially prominent in towns. The results indicate that the language use of individuals may have been affected by various external factors, and that an apparently similar outcome could even have been the result of different factors. Surprisingly, the greatest variation in the present forms of hafa was e.g. attested in the letters of the oldest brother and the half-sister, writers that seemingly had nothing in common that was not also shared by their siblings as well. A closer examination of the distribution of variants in their letters revealed that the apparent variation in the brother’s letters seems to reflect a conscious change of norm from the hefi/hefir-forms in his early letters, written while he was a student, to hef/hefur shortly after his graduation from university. A comparison with other private and published texts by him supports this interpretation. The half-sister, on the other hand, was less likely to have been affected by the discourse on language use and standardisation efforts due to her social status and lack of formal education. Internal variation occurs in her letters in general, and as the main difference between her and all the other siblings was geographical origin and location, the question arose whether the distribution of variants could have been partly dialectal, i.e. if the forms hefi and hefir were more frequent in northern Iceland than in the southwest. Comparison of her letters with letters by another northern writer indicates that this might have been the case, and further comparison with letters from a larger database written by a number of people in the two areas shows that, even if some variation can be attested in both parts, the hefi/hefir-variants seem more frequent among the northerners. Recent and unadapted lexical borrowings appeared in the letters of all five writers, even if their relative frequency differed. Such words were most prominent in the brothers’ letters, with more occurences and a greater number of borrowed head words, a considerable part of them belonging to educated and specialised vocabulary. Furthermore, instances of code switching are found in letters from both brothers while they rarely occured in the sisters’ letters. In the letters of the three sisters there was also a contrast between the full sisters and the half-sister, the latter using lexical borrowings considerably less than the others.

These results indicate that external factors such as gender, formal education, urban living and foreign contacts, may have affected the use of lexical borrowings, seemingly more than the emerging standard where the use of such words was discouraged. The brothers – who were highly educated (an option not open to young women at the time), and lived their entire life in urban settings and partly in Copenhagen – used lexical borrowings relatively frequently despite their access to the language discourse of the time, while their sisters, who got little or no formal education, used them less frequently, especially their rural half-sister. It should be noted, however, that these results come from private letters, and other studies have shown that lexical borrowings were considerably less frequent in formal texts from the same period, i.e. in published newspapers, though they were more common in papers published in Reykjavík than elsewhere in Iceland. A difference between informal, personal writings and formal, public texts has also been attested in studies of modern Icelandic.