Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1961, Blaðsíða 107

ICELANDIC DIALECTOLOGY: METHODS AND RESULTS
103
However, the settlers from each district m Norway did not neces-
sarily keep together in Iceland, but spread to different parts of the
country. In other words, although most of the existing varieties of
Norwegian were brought to Iceland, the dialect division and the
dialect boundaries themselves were not. This undoubtedly led to a
far-reaching levelling of pre-existing differences, so that, at the end
of the Age of Settlement, i. e. towards the middle of the tenth century,
Icelandic probably was, to the furthest possible degree, uniform and
free of dialect variation.
It is well-known that the language of a colonized area will often
retain single, isolated features which have become obsolete or have
even disappeared in the mother country. American English is a case
in point. H. L. Mencken writes:85
A large number of words and phrases, many of them now exclusively
American, are ... survivals from the English of the Seventeenth Century,
long since oboolete or merely provincial in England.
But whether, as has been suggested,86 such a tendency to archaism
can in any way be responsible for a continued stability and uni-
formity in development over a long period, as in the case of Icelandic,
is more than doubtful—except, aof course, as pointed out above, as
the point of departure of the development. In the Germanic linguistic
area, there are comparable cases. The Faroe Islands were settled at
about the same time or not much earlier than Iceland. And Great-
Britain was colonized by Germanic-speaking settlers only a few
centuries earlier than Iceland. Nevertheless, the trend of development
of the languages in these countries has been very different from Ice-
landic. Besides, in colonized areas, we often find, not only a tendency
to archaism as compared with the mother country, but often also a
certain love of novelty, even a lack of restraint, in matters of
85 H. L. Mencken, The American Language (4th ed., repr.; New York, N. Y.,
1949), pp. 127f.
80 Dahlstedt, “íslenzk mállýzkulandafræði,” pp. 47—50.