Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1985, Síða 52

50
Bergljót Baldursdóttir
amount of English vocabulary had been fitted with Finnish mor-
phology and inflected like Finnish words (1977:177). The Finnish of
the adults bom in America deviated even more from the Finnish
spoken in Finland. She points out that for the adults born in America,
Finnish—English bilingualism very quickly became English dominant
bilingualism, and samples of American Finnish that had spanned more
than one generation gave the impression of greatly imperfect learning
(1977:182). The changes Karttunen observed were often characterized
by that sentence structure appeared rather limited, inflections seemed
to break down frequently, the principles of vowel harmony and con-
sonant gradation were only partially mastered or not leamed at all
(1977:82).
In her study of language death in Scotland, Dorian (1977, 1981,
1982) fount that one of the characteristics of a dying language is the
existence of speakers of very variable proficiency. The speakers of East
Sutherland Gaelic (ESG) vary from being passive bilinguals and semi-
speakers, to being fluent speakers of the language. Dorian found that
changes were taking place in ESG, changes which did not differ greatly
form the types of changes found in ordinary „healthy“ languages
(1981:151). On the other hand, although the type of change was not
unusual, the amount was, and furthermore the changes were observed
even among the fluent speakers of the language. What is particularly
interesting for the present purpose is that different changes were found
in the different groups of speakers she studied. That is, in some in-
stances old fluent speakers (OFS) performed differently from young
fluent speakers (YFS) and fluent speakers (FS) performed differently
from semi-speakers (SS). When explaining these differences Dorian
found that the difference between OFS and YFS could not be explained
by simple decrease in use, because there was no great falling-off in the
use of Gaelic among the YFS as compared with the OFS (1981:153).
On the other hand decrease in use could be the major explanation for
the difference between FS and SS. The semi-speakers differ from the
fluent speakers in that their command of Gaelic (ESG) is imperfect in
many ways. This is often because they never fully acquired the lan-
guage, because of too little exposure and little use. Sometimes it is be-
cause some language attrition has taken place, for example when
people have moved away to a monolingual society (Dorian 1982:54).
Dorian points out that this incomplete acquisition of the semi-speakers