Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2010, Qupperneq 122

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Hjalmar P. Petersen
Islands) indicate a 50% increase in the import of Danish weekly maga-
zines in the period from 1993—2000 (Jacobsen 2007). People also read a
lot of books and manuals in Danish, simply because these are not worth
translating, being too expensive and targeting too few speakers.
Danish is also very much present in other aspects of daily life. Signs
in supermarkets are often in Danish and so on. In short, one cannot get
by on the islands without Danish. Hence it is not surprising that a
woman from Eastern Europe who married a Faroe Islander stated in an
interview with the newspaper Dimmahztting (19/09/2007) that it is nec-
essary to know Danish in order to manage in daily life on the islands.
Faroe Islanders have, according to Spndergaard (1988), a generally
positive attitude towards Danish. According to Spndergaard, people say
that it is practical to master Danish: many continue their studies in Den-
mark and much business is conducted with or through Denmark.
Another positive aspect of knowing Danish is that it makes inter-Scandi-
navian communication possible (Spndergaard 1988).
In a study of the attitudes towards Faroese in Faroese schools, Vár 1
Ólavstovu (2007:43—44) asked pupils in three upper secondary schools
whether they preferred Danish or Faroese as school subjects. The results
are summarized in Table2:
FEMALES MALES
Prefer Faroese 60.4 45.2
Prefer Danish 30.2 42.9
Like both 2.8 4.8
Do not know 5-7 7-i
No information 0.9 0.0
Total: 100% 100%
Table 2: Thegeneral attitude towards the subjects Faroese and Danish in three
upper secondaty schools on the Faroe Islands.
As Table 2 shows, the pupils do not have an especially negative attitude
towards Danish
To summarize, speakers’ attitudes towards Danish, the length of the
contact between Danish and Faroese, the many domains where Danish is
still used on the Faroe Islands and the relatively short time that Faroese
has been used as a written language could help explain why Faroese is