Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2008, Page 115

LÁNISTICIN OC DANSKT í FØROYSKUM
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The neuter plural is used to denote people
in general in Faroese as in øll 'all’, tey 'they'.
This being the result of contact with Danish
and the increased awareness of gender and
sex in language use, but assisted by the na-
tive semantic assignment rule that 'beings of
both sexes are neuter’ (Petersen 2008).
13. Summary and conclusion
Faroese behaves very much in line with the
proposed Stage 3 of the Borrowing Scale in
Thomason & Kaufman (1988:74-76). Faroese
has replicated some syntactic structures
from Danish and has borrowed other parts
of speech as well, as we have shown in the
preceeding sections. More precisely:
general is replicated into Faroese as øll 'all' as
opposed to the masculine plural in lcelandic,
allir 'all'.
The language situation is summarized in
the following diagram; we have concen-
trated on the left side in this article, which is
the influence of Danish on Faroese. The
other side shows how the Faroe Islanders
speak Danish.
Danish O Faroese |
Lexicon (very) strong
Phonology weak
Morphosyntax
moderate to
fairly mixed
Faroese O Danish1
extremely little
strong
moderate to
fairly mixed
Lexicon: Yes No
Adpositions /
Derv. suffixes, abstracted
away from loanwords /
Possible inflectional suffixes,
restricted to borrowings /
Personal pronouns /
Demonstrative pronouns /
Low numerals /
Structure:
Phonomicization /
Stress rules /
Syntax: few aspects /
Although there are /'s under no for pro-
nouns and numerals, we have shown that
the Danish indefinite pronoun mann 'one' is
extremely common in Faroese and that the
cardinal numbers from 20 onwards are the
only ones used in the spoken language. Note
also that Danish discourse and the use of the
neuter plural when referring to people in
The Danish influence on the Faroese lexicop
is strong. On the other hand, there is little
Faroese influence on the Danish lexicon
when Faroe Islanders speak Danish, with the
exception of some nonce-borrowings and
code switches. The only Faroese word that
has found its way into a Danish dictionary is
grind 'pilot whale', (see for example Politikens
Etymologiske Ordbog from 2000).
We have shown that there is little influ-
ence on the phonological system and cases
in which we find such influence are re-
stricted to loanwords such as stress and the
two new vowel phonemes /a:/, /y:/ and /au:/.
Some prepositions and circumpositions
are borrowed, as are conjunctions and cer-
tain productive derivational suffixes. There
were no cases of the productive plural -s,
which has a very restricted distribution. In
addition, we have included influence in the
gender system, something that was not men-
tioned at Stage 3 by Thomason & Kaufman
1988.