Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Page 116
114
Höskuldur Þráinsson og Kristján Árnason
on the one hand we want to give an account of the grammar of the ideal
speaker of each dialect (the “grammar of the dialect”), and on the other
we want an explanation of how individual grammars are acquired and
how (and why) they change.
3.2 Some sociolinguistic factors
3.2.1 Accommodation
One sociolinguistic concept which can contribute to the understand-
ing of how linguistic changes spread is that of accommodation. The
basic idea can be described as follows: When speakers of different
but mutually intelligible dialects come into contact, they may, con-
sciously or unconsciously, modify their language and adapt their di-
alect to that of their conversation partner (cf. Trudgill 1986:1-2). This
frequently begins at the lexical level (Tmdgill 1986:25). If a speaker
accommodates frequently enough to a particular accent or dialect, the
accommodation may in time become permanent (Trudgill 1986:39).
Several factors may interact to determine when this happens and in
which direction. Other things being equal, however, the simplest con-
cept of accommodation obviously predicts that “majority dialects” will
become stronger and stronger because one meets more speakers of
the majority dialect than ones who speak some minority dialect (cf.
Tmdgill 1986:1-3 ff., 39 ff.). In the Icelandic context described in the
preceding sections, this would seem to predict a general spreading of
the “Reykjavík dialect” since the 1940s, which was pretty much what
we found.
But this simple concept of accommodation begs a lot of questions, of
course. First of all, recall that many of the features characterizing the
Reykjavík dialect were innovations. The accommodation account does
not say anything about the question why they came about in the first
place. Second, these innovations must obviously have started to spread
before they became “a majority dialect”. Hence we clearly need to look
more closely at the factors which influence accommodation, and that
might also tell us something about the likelihood of the spreading of
the other “brand new” dialectal (or idiolectal) features under discus-