Studia Islandica - 01.06.1964, Blaðsíða 209

207
The centre of this monophthongal pronunciation is in
Austur-Skaftafellssýsla and Vestur-Skaftafellssýsla. All the
informants in this area used it to some extent or another,
but it was somewhat more prominent in Austur-Skaftafells-
sýsla. It is also fairly common in Suður-Múlasýsla, where it
is found as far north as Eskifjörður. In the easternmost
district of Rangárvallasýsla, especially in Austur-Eyjaf jalla-
hreppur, it occurs alongside the diphthongal pronunciation
in the speech of a certain proportion of the speakers.
In this dialect the vowel [e:] occupies a special position
in that it is diphthongized far more frequently than the other
vowels involved.
8. Most speakers have a fricative before [ð] in such
words as hafði and sagði, i.e. [havði], [saqði]. In the speech
of some people, however, the fricative is replaced by a stop:
[haljði], [sagði]. These two variants are here referred to
as the fricative pronunciation and the stop pronunciation,
respectively.
The principal home of the stop pronunciation is in the
north, but in most places the fricative pronunciation is
found right alongside it. It is most common in Suður-Þing-
eyjarsýsla, where 73% of the informants used it exclusively
or in part. It was found to be far less common in the towns
and villages of the North than in the country districts. In
some parts of the North-Western Peninsula, and in fact else-
where in the West as well, the stop pronunciation also occurs
side by side with the fricative pronunciation, but in the East
and South it is virtually unknown.
A third development of the original clusters [fð], [gð]
should be mentioned here, though it is quite rare. Some in-
formants (especially adults) on the North-Western Penin-
sula had a stop replacing the second element rather than
the first: [havch], [saq^i]. Similarly many of the same in-
formants had [d] for original [ð] in the cluster [rð], as for
instance in the word heyrðu [heirdy].