Orð og tunga - 01.06.2017, Qupperneq 85

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Lykilorð
íslenska, 19. öld, máltengsl, erlend máláhrif, aðkomuorð
Keywords
Icelandic, 19th century, language contact, lexical borrowings
Abstract
On Icelandic-Danish language contact in the 19th century
and its linguistic influence
Icelanders were the subjects of Danish kings for more than fi ve centuries. This arti-
cle 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 infl uenced 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 vo-
cabulary based on investigations of 19th century texts. In the spirit of historical socio-
linguistics, we examine a variety of published and unpublished texts, and refer both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 national state with Danish as the na-
tional 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 confi ned to a small group of high offi cials, increased. Travels between the
two countries became easier and more frequent, a growing number of Danes sett led
in Iceland (and vice versa), and bilingualism became more common among the gen-
eral Icelandic public. The political struggle for national independence, as well as the
growing presence of Danish in Iceland, is refl ected in the language discourse of the
19th century, where the impact of Danish was a constant concern. It was seen as a se-
rious threat to Icelandic, most prominent in the speech in Reykjavik, the fastest grow-
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