Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Page 118

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Höskuldur Þráinsson og Kristján Árnason
front vowels, for instance (cf. (13g) above). The “confused pronun-
ciation” (Icel. hljóðvilla, also referred to as flámœli or “slack-jawed
speech”) is the phonological variable that is (or was) most clearly stig-
matized. As a result it can be used by authors of novels or plays who
want to give an example of “low class” speech. (Translators of “My Fair
Lady” have tried to imitate it in their attempts to make Eliza Doolittle’s
speech something worth making fun of and correcting.) It is worth
noting that this dialectal feature also has the other two characterstics
listed in (17), as shown in (18):
(18) a The phonemic contrasts between [i] /i/ and [e] /e/ on the one
hand and [y] /u/ and [œ] /ö/ on the other are “confused”,
thus leading to potential confusion (or misunderstanding) of
words like hið, beð; sugur, sögur.
b The “confused” pronunciation does not tally with the orthog-
raphy.
It might seem that (18b) is an inaccurate statement since it takes as
a point of departure the relationship between spelling and phonet-
ics/phonology that holds in the speech of those who have the “correct”
pronunciation. But it tumed out that those who spoke the “confused”
dialect had actual problems with leaming how to spell. This was clearly
one of the main motivations for the attempts to uproot this dialectal
feature in the 1940s and early 1950s — attempts that involved special
courses for teachers, given by BG (Bjöm Guðfinnsson) himself.
We can therefore conclude that familiar sociolinguistic reasons un-
doubtedly contributed to the fact that the confused pronunciation was
stigmatized. It should also be clear that whatever the result of the direct
teaching in the schools in the 1940s and 1950s, this state of affairs has
made it very unlikely that dialect accommodation, if it is influenced by
the factors we have described, would go in the direction of the confused
pronunciation. As we will see in Section 3.3 below, however, it could
not easily go in the other direction either for purely linguistic reasons.
It is much more difficult to explain the reason for the attitudes toward
certain other dialectal features. Pálmason notes, for instance (1983:37),