Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Page 94

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Höskuldur Þráinsson og Kristján Árnason
Benediktsson 1961-62; Jónsson 1964). On the basis of this research,
Guðfinnsson also published a handbook for teachers (1947), describing
the most important dialectal differences, commenting on their origin,
expressing his opinion about their desirability (including beauty or lack
thereof) and suggesting ways of teaching the more desirable variants
to school children. In the 1940s Guðfinnsson also gave a number of
courses for teachers, aimed at improving their pronunciation and teach-
ing them how to teach pronunciation and diction to their students (cf.
Guðfinnsson 1947:37^-1).
While we would like to maintain that we are interested in all the
aspects of dialect studies, descriptive, pedagogical and theoretical, we
believe that we have emphasized the theoretical aspect more than pre-
vious researchers. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of our research
is the historical perspective that we have been able to create. Hav-
ing access to the tremendous wealth of material left behind by the late
Guðfinnsson, we have not only been able to compare the general aspects
of our results to his but in the 1980s we were able to interview some of
the speakers he talked to about 40 years earlier, so we can study how
their language has changed (cf. Ámason & Þráinsson 1983; Þráinsson
& Ámason 1984; Þráinsson & Ámason 1986). Furthermore, since we
have attempted to include speakers of different age groups and social
classes, we are able to get a more complete picture of the distribution
of Icelandic dialects. Finally, by entering the data into a computer we
are able to investigate various correlations that our predecessors could
not study.
Having provided this background we will now give an overview of
phonological variation in Modem Icelandic.
2. An overview of phonological variation in Icelandic
2.0 Introduction
In this section we will first explain the nature of the dialect studies
our paper is based on. Then we will briefly outline the sound system of
Modem Icelandic and go on to describe the main phonological variables
discovered in the studies under consideration. Finally, we will deter-