Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1961, Page 78

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IIREINN BENEDIKTSSON
Tliis geography of words and meanings is an interesting subject, which
has been neglected, but is in urgent need of investigation, because, with
improved communications, increased education and the loquacity of the
radio, there is a danger that these differences will disappear.
During the last fifteen years or so, a great aniount of new material
of this kind has come to light, mainly in connection with the lexico-
graphical work on the Modern Icelandic Dictionary now being com-
piled in the University of Iceland. Our knowledge of the geographic
distribution of words and their meanings has therefore greatly in-
creased, and is now much more precise than it was earlier. It has thus
become clear, on the one hand, that the areas of occurrence of words
or meanings are different from what they were previously thought to
be and, especially, that they may be more restricted, and on the other
hand, that the boundaries are often clearer and sharper than had
been thought.
But still, although systematic observations have multiplied, little
has been published of the material, and no investigation on a larger
scale has been undertaken. I shall mention only a study of the voca-
bulary specific to the county of Vestur-Skajtafellssýsla by Jón Aðal-
steinn Jónsson, dating from 1953.14 The author excerpted from Blön-
dal’s Dictionary and found about 800 words thus marked. Of these
he selected about a hundred, viz. those that had the widest distri-
bution within the county. He then examined their distribution west-
wards, and—by using a method which, as we shall later see, has been
much applied in Icelandic dialectology, viz. that of statistical calcula-
tion of the frequencies of occurrence—he found that their distri-
bution varied greatly from one word to another. Although Jónsson’s
study is more in the nature of a tentative, preliminary investigation—
it does not attempt to show the distribution in detail—he nevertheless
concludes ‘that dialects exist in this country in people’s vocabulary
lítið hefir verið sinnt, en þyrfti að rannsaka, því að hætta er á, að munur
þessi fari að forgörðum mcð bættum samgöngum, aukinni skólasókn og
útvarpsmælgi.
14 “Lítil athugun ..pp. 139—150.