„annaðhvort með dönskum hala eða höfði, enn að öðru leiti íslenskt“

On the contact between Icelandic and Danish in the 19th century and their influence

Abstract

On Icelandic-Danish language contact in the 19th century and its linguistic influence

Icelanders were the subjects of Danish kings for more than five centuries. This article focuses on Icelandic-Danish language contact towards the end of this period, i.e. in the 19th century when Icelandic is assumed to have been heavily influenced by Danish. This assumption is, however, based primarily on meta­linguistic evidence and random examples rather than on empirical research. The purpose of the present article is to question this, seeking to evaluate the impact of Danish on Icelandic vocabulary based on investigations of 19th century texts. In the spirit of historical sociolinguistics, we examine a variety of published and unpublished texts, and refer both to the external sociohistorical situation and language use as it appears in our texts.

In the 19th century, the Danish kingdom was losing territories and changing from a multi­ethnic and plurilingual empire, into a nation state with Danish as the national language. Together with the prevailing 19th century ideology of nationalism in Europe, the changes within the state promoted ideas of national independence for Iceland, and the Icelandic language became a central symbol of nationhood. At the same time, direct contact between Icelandic and Danish, formerly quite limited and mostly confined to a small group of high  officials, increased. Travels between the two countries became easier and more frequent, a growing number of Danes settled in Iceland (and vice versa), and bilingualism became more common among the general Icelandic public. The political struggle for national independence, as well as the growing presence of Danish in Iceland, is reflected in the language discourse of the 19th century, where the impact of Danish was a constant concern. It was seen as a serious threat to Icelandic, most prominent in the speech in Reykjavik, the fastest growing urban centre. This article presents the results of two investigations of lexical borrowings, based on recently compiled corpora of 19th century Icelandic texts: a corpus of printed newspapers and periodicals, and a corpus of unpublished and handwritten private letters. The first study included words in both corpora, that contained one of four borrowed affixes, an-, be-, -heit and -era, which were commonly featured in contemporary (negative) comments on foreign influence. The results show that such words were, in fact, rare in the texts, and that their number, relative to the total number of running words, decreased in the course of the century, especially in the newspapers. The second investigation was directed at recent borrowings (including one-word code-switches) in a subcorpus of newspapers from the last quarter of the 19th century. The results show a very moderate number of tokens relative to the total number of running words in the texts as a whole (0.37%). We do, however, see a clear increase between 1875 and 1900, as well as a higher proportion of lexical borrowings in the Reykjavik newspapers than in those published elsewhere. Furthermore, the words in question were particularly prominent in advertisements compared to the rest of the text.

The main conclusion of the article is that both the contact situation and the amount and character of the borrowed words found in the texts, place 19th century Icelandic on step 1 of Thomason and Kaufman’s borrowing scale, and that the overall results show much less influence from Danish than contemporary metalinguistic comments indicated.