Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Side 106

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Höskuldur Práinsson og Kristján Árnason
obviously a huge difference between the pronunciation of such a person
and one who uses the [xv] pronunciation once and the [khv] 15 times
in the same study, as evidenced by the fact that the former would get
an [xv] grade or index of 194 on the RÍN scale ((2x15 + Ixl)/16)
and the latter 106 ((1x15 + 2xl)/16). It does not seem to make much
sense to put both into the same group. An altemative would be to say
that all speakers with a dialectal index in the 176-200 range in the
RÍN scoring system would be considered “pure” dialect speakers in
BG’s system, those with an index of 126-175 would be said to have
“mixed” pronunciation and an index in the 100-125 would mean that
the speakers would be considered not to have the dialect feature in
question. In a sample with 16 instancer. of hv-words, for instance, this
would mean that the speakers who used the [xv] pronunciation at least
13 times would be said to be “pure” speakers of dialect but if they used
it less than 5 times (out of 16 examples) it would be said that they
did not have it. Anything in between would make them fall into the
“mixed” category. In the comparison of our own data with BG’s below,
we use this latter method of classifying the speakers unless otherwise
stated.
2.5.2 The situation in Reykjavík
With this in mind, let us now look at some percentages for the “ma-
jority” dialect in Reykjavík, comparing BG’s results in the 1940s and
the RÍN results in the 1980s. This is done in Table 3. There we compare
figures (percentages) from BG’s study of school aged teenagers with
two figures from the RÍN study. The first column of RÍN figures is
labelled “BG’s gen(eration)”, meaning that this is the generation BG’s
figures were based on (and our sample actually includes some of the
speakers he tested about forty years earlier, as explained above). The
second column is labelled “Young(est) gen(eration)”, which includes
school children who are of about the same age as or slightly older than
the children BG tested.
somewhat unclear so the classification “confused” did not seem entirely warranted (cf.
also Guðfinnsson 1947:25, 1964:82).