Orð og tunga - 01.06.2011, Page 45

Arne Torp: Islandsk og strilemál - antidansk?
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developments could probably be seen as instants of so called hyperdialectisms or
neighbor opposition (cf. Trudgill 1988:550-560), i.e. increasing the linguistic distance
between city and countryside.
Plosives are less "vowel-like" than fricatives and sonorants, and the same is true
of any unvoiced consonant compared with its voiced counterpart (e.g. p : b, f: v).
Icelandic consonants tend to be more unvoiced that in most other related languages,
and this may perhaps be seen as an "extension" of the aforementioned conspiracy
for the development of stops in postvocalic consonants, both developments meaning
strengthening of the consonantal element, including both desonorization and prea-
spiration of plosives (cf. Gunnar Ólafur Hansson 2001; ch. 6). In most other Nordic
dialects, with Danish as the opposite extreme, we see tendencies in the same environ-
ment to assimilate clusters (e.g. nd, Id, ng > nn, ll, rjrj) and weaken the consonants (e.g.
vl, yl, vn, yn > ul, il, in, un; cf. ch. 7).
In the strengthening processes phonological oppositions are mostly well pre-
served; phonemic mergers hardly ever occur. These changes may therefore be char-
acterized as structure-preserving. Assimilations and weakenings on the other hand
very often lead to mergers. The phonemic conservatism in the Westem Nordic area
is argued to be a consequence of little language contact, whereas the many radical
changes in especially Danish on the other side are thought to have been caused by
long and intensive contact.
Two conclusions are drawn in the final chapters (8-9): One is the rather trivial and
often observed conclusion that language contact tends to promote language change.
The second and perhaps somewhat less trivial conclusion could be that changes in
areas where there has been little language contact tend to be structure preserving.
Arne Torp
Institutt for lingvistiske og nordiske studier
Universitetet i Oslo
Postboks 1102 Blindern
N0317OSLO
arne.torp@iln.uio.no