Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 124

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Alexander Andrason
information of the relevant linguistic situation and present some argu-
ments for the claim that the variant of Icelandic under discussion has
properties that justify calling it Pidgin Icelandic.
2. Pidgin Icelandic
Increased immigration to Iceland in recent years has given rise to the
creation of many non-stabilized and partially targeted immigrant ver-
sions of Standard Icelandic (SI). Their speakers perceive their own
mother tongue as a substratum while Icelandic is seen as the super-
stratum and target language. Once the speaker acquires fluency in Ice-
landic, he leaves his intermediate language. Many speakers, however,
do not leam Icelandic to this degree. On the contrary, they continue
living on the boundary between their mother tongue and the standard
language.
When speakers of different non-stabilized immigrant versions of
Icelandic coexist and communicate, they search for a linguistic con-
sensus and find a mutually intelligible version of Icelandic which they
speak.4 In consequence, a new pidgin5 language is bom (cf. the term
tertiary hybridization, Miihlháusler 1986:124-125 and Holm 1988:5).
This language has its source in numerous immigrant versions of
Standard Icelandic which are mutually intelligible and not a single one
of them is regarded as a superstratum or a substratum — on the con-
trary, all of them are socially equal. In this paper I will use the term
Pidgin Icelandic (PI) to refer to this new idiom used by the immigrant
community in Iceland. However, it must be noted that the immigrant
Pidgin Icelandic corresponds rather to what Múhlháusler (1986:62-
4 In fact, since in many instances immigrants from different nations have reduced
knowledge of English and their proficiency in Icelandic is highly limited, this jargon
is the only language they can use at work in order to communicate. Of course, immi-
grants of the same origin, e.g. Poles or Spanish speakers, continue using their respec-
tive native languages for group-intemal communicative purposes. In other words,
Poles do not use Pidgin Icelandic for conversations in which uniquely Polish speak-
ers take part.
5 I use the term pidgin here to cover the entire continuum from pre-pidgins or jar-
gons to stabilized and extended pidgins, cf. Muhlhausler 1986.