Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2008, Page 100

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THE BORROWING SCALE AND DANISH IN FAROESE
nal suffixes, (vi) pronouns and numerals, (vii)
phonemes and (viii) some syntactic changes.
A fmal short section addresses gender in
language contact, followed by a discussion
and conclusion.
2. Methodology
The data presented here are partially based
on a database on Faroese-Danish bilingua-
lism that is currently being established at the
Center on Multilingualism at the University
of Hamburg. The project is labeled K8, with
"K” standing for Kommunikation/Commun-
ication and is funded by the German Re-
search Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemein-
schajt).
The database is comprised of semi-in-
formal interviews that I conducted on the
Faroe Islands in November 2005. 30 inform-
ants were interviewed. Of these, 15 were be-
tween the age of 16 to 20 and 15 were over
the age of 70.
When discussing prepositions, circum-
positions, conjunctions, suffixes, etc., I went
through Donsk-føroysk orðabók [Danish-
Faroese dictionaryj from 1995. Here I found
different conjunctions that are used in mod-
ern, spoken Faroese. I then compared these
findings to search results from two text-cor-
pora: (http://spraakbanken.gu.se/) and
http://corp.hum.sdu.dk/cqp.fo.html. The
former contains all issues of the newspaper
Dimmalcetting from 1998, the latter all copies
of the newspaper Sosialurin from 2004.
In some cases, I wanted to see how old
certain borrowings were, for example, the
prepositions foruttan 'without' and íblant
'among’. For this purpose I searched the in-
ternet and a database with the Ballad Lan-
guage (1400-1800). I did not look for the
prepositions in all of the ballads but rather
only in the Heroic Ballads, which I have in
Word format. In addition to this I searched
the internet by writing WORD site:fo.
The discussion of the -s plural is based
on work that I did in collaboration with
Helge Sandøy (University of Bergen) on the
Faroe Islands in 2004.1 interviewed 33 people
from three different life-styles. 14 were pri-
mary and secondary school pupils (approxi-
mately 14 years of age), 11 had some further
education and 8 had a university education.
In order to determine the plural form of
harðdiskur 'hard drive', for example, I would
present the speakers with a sentence like (1).
The sentence was recorded and the relevant
lexical item transcribed by H. Sandøy and
myself.
(7) Teldan hjá mcer hevur ein harðdisk. Summ-
ar hava tveir. Cer setningin niðanfyri lidnan:
Teldan hjá mcer hevur tveir___________.
'My computer has one hard disk. Some have
two. Complete the sentence below: My
computer has two______________.
The informants could answer with, for ex-
ample, harðdiskar 'hard drives' or harðdisks
'hard drives'.
In order to find out how frequently
some of the syntactic structures I discuss in
this paper are used, I performed a grammat-
icality judgment test in March 2008 at
Føroya Studentaskúli og HF-Skeið in which
36 questionnaires were distributed among
the students. They could choose between
four different answers: 1 'the sentence is to-
tally grammatical', 2 'the sentence is gram-
matical, but I would not use it myself', 3 'the
sentence is not really grammatical or un-