Orð og tunga - 01.06.2017, Síða 86

76 Orð og tunga
ing urban centre. This article presents the results of two investigations of lexical bor-
rowings, based on recently compiled corpora of 19th century Icelandic texts: a corpus
of printed newspapers and periodicals, and a corpus of unpublished and handwrit-
ten private lett ers. The fi rst study included words in both corpora, that contained
one of four borrowed affi xes, an-, be-, -heit and -era, which were commonly featured
in contemporary (negative) comments on foreign infl uence. The results show that
such words were, in fact, rare in the texts, and that their number, relative to the total
number of running words, decreased in the course of the century, especially in the
newspapers. The second investigation was directed at recent borrowings (including
one-word code-switches) in a subcorpus of newspapers from the last quarter of the
19th century. The results show a very moderate number of tokens relative to the total
number of running words in the texts as a whole (0.37%). We do, however, see a clear
increase between 1875 and 1900, as well as a higher proportion of lexical borrowings
in the Reykjavik newspapers than in those published elsewhere. Furthermore, the
words in question were particularly prominent in advertisements compared to the
rest of the text.
The main conclusion of the article is that both the contact situation and the
amount and character of the borrowed words found in the texts, place 19th century
Icelandic on step 1 of Thomason and Kaufman’s borrowing scale, and that the over-
all results show much less infl uence from Danish than contemporary metalinguistic
comments indicated.
Ásta Svavarsdóttir
Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum
Laugavegi 13
101 Reykjavík
asta@hi.is
tunga_19.indb 76 5.6.2017 20:27:43