Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Side 114

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Höskuldur Þráinsson og Kristján Árnason
a pretty good idea of which dialectal features are spreading or “winning
out” in 20th century Icelandic and how fast. It remains, however, to say
something more about the diphthongization of vowels before /ng,nk/
(feature (7e)). In the 1940s the diphthongal pronunciation was used by
the majority of school children all over Iceland, according to BG (cf.
Guðfinnsson 1964:118 ff.), and the monophthongal pronunciation was
pretty much restricted to the Westem Fjords (“pure” monophthongal
pronunciation ranging from about 15% in Vestur-Barðastrandarsýslato
36% in Norður-ísafjarðarsýsla). Although we do not have the figures
to prove it yet, it is clear that the diphthongal pronunciation has spread
considerably in these areas too and it has seemed to us that the youngest
generation has very little traces of it.15
The spreading of the “majority features” under discussion here can
therefore be summarized as in (13):
(13) a “Soft” (= unasp.) pronunciation:
b Devoicing of sonorants:
c [khv] pronunciation:
d Diphthongization before /gi/:
e Diphthongization before /ng,nk/:
f [rtn, rtl] pronunciation:
g “Correct” pronunciation:
h Fricatives before /ð/:
i [gl] pronunciation of /ngl/:
Spreading slowly.
Spreading fast.
Spreading fast.
Spreading slowly.
Spreading fast.
Spreading fast.
Spreading fast.
Spreading fast.
Not clear.
The phrase “spreading fast” is perhaps misleading in some instances
here since some of these features have reached the point where they
have pretty much eliminated the altemative. This is probably tme of
15 Our impression, when we were collecting the data (“we” in this case being
Höskuldur and Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson, who did most of the data collection in the
Westem Fjords), was that monophthongal pronunciation of /ö/ [œ] is best preserved,
especially in words where there is vocalic altemation between /a,ö/ and even /e/ (cf. töng
(N, sg.), tangar (G, sg.), tengur (N, pl.) ‘pliers’) and that monophthongal pronunciation
of /e/ was most likely to be preserved in such words, if at all. This is of some interest
since monophthongal pronunciation of /a/ is said to have been most common in the
1940s (cf. Guðfinnsson 1964:132-133).