Orð og tunga - 01.06.2009, Page 54

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Orð og tunga
lieved to be increasing in recent times due to increased language contact. We look
at two periods in the history of the language — the 14th and 15th centuries char-
acterised by Middle Low German influence in Northem Europe and modern times
from the late 19th century till the present, especially the last few decades, when lin-
guistic influence typically comes from English. The Middle Low German influence
was largely indirect in Iceland as it was transmitted through the Scandinavian lan-
guages, which were much more deeply influenced than Icelandic. In Icelandic docu-
ments before 1500 there are close to 3,000 examples of 500-600 different words of
Middle Low German descent. About half of them only appear once or twice in the
documents, and relatively few are still in use. In modem times the main linguistic
influence was first from Danish and later, especially after World War II, from English.
Recent studies of various texts from Modern Icelandic speech and writing have in-
dicated that a very small proportion of the texts consists of lexical borrowings (less
than 0.5% of mnning words on the average). They also show that the frequency of
such words varies greatly according to genre, style and register — in newspapers,
the percentage is e.g. almost 1% in advertisements while it is as low as 0.04% in edito-
rials. Furthermore it has been shown that young people tend to use more borrowings
from English than older persons, as might be expected from the fact that the young in
general are more fluent in English. Many of the borrowed words only occur once in
the texts, and presumably some of the less adapted words should rather be analysed
as (more or less conscious) code switches than as actual borrowings. Others are more
frequent, and they tend to be better adapted, orthographically, phonetically and/or
grammatically. The discussion focuses mainly on the frequency and distribution of
lexical borrowings in texts from the two periods, but their grammatical and semantic
characteristics, as well as their development is also discussed briefly.
Ásta Svavarsdóttir
Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum / Háskóla íslands
Neshaga 16
1S-107 Rcykjavík
asta@hi.is
Veturliði Óskarsson
Mcnntavísindasviði Háskóla íslands
v/Stakknhlíð
1S-105 Reykjavík
veturosk@hi.is