Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2017, Qupperneq 35

summary
‘Quotations and code-switching in the speech of bilingual Danes’
Keywords: code-switching, quotation, constructed dialouge, speaker roles, bilingualism,
Danes in Iceland
This paper reports on a study of the form and function of direct speech in narrations of
bilingual Danes who had lived in Iceland for more than half a century. The narrations
occurred in interviews conducted in Icelandic or Danish and the study focuses on code-
switching in these narrations. Code-switching in direct speech is a tool that bilingual
speakers can use to signal that the speaker is changing roles and quoting or echoing what
others have said. The Danes sometimes use code-switching in this situation and some-
times not, and this is independent of whether the original language of the direct speech is
(or was) the same as or different from the language that the speakers are using in the nar-
ration at the time. Thus the language of the direct speech need not be the one actually used
by the person whose words are being quoted. Hence the direct speech is actually a recre-
ation by the speaker (the narrator) rather than an accurate word-by-word quotation. The
speaker gives the direct speech the form that suits the narration at the time, he or she
(re-)creates it but the person quoted supplies the content. It is a transposition of previous
events into new situations: The event is staged for the listener, made more vivid and
moved closer to the listener, as it were, by using direct speech. The bilingual speaker can
thus also choose in which of the two languages he or she presents the direct speech.
Þóra Björk Hjartardóttir
Háskóla Íslands
IS-101 Reykjavík
thorah@hi.is
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