Orð og tunga - 2021, Blaðsíða 79

68 Orð og tunga
can be attested in both parts, the hefi/hefir­variants seem more frequent among the
northerners.
Recent and unadapted lexical borrowings appeared in the letters of all five writ­
ers, even if their relative frequency differed. Such words were most prominent in
the brothers’ letters, with more occurences and a greater number of borrowed head
words, a considerable part of them belonging to educated and specialised vocabu­
lary. Furthermore, instances of code switching are found in letters from both brothers
while they rarely occured in the sisters’ letters. In the letters of the three sisters there
was also a contrast between the full sisters and the half­sister, the latter using lexical
borrowings considerably less than the others. These results indicate that external fac­
tors such as gender, formal education, urban living and foreign contacts, may have
affected the use of lexical borrowings, seemingly more than the emerging standard
where the use of such words was discouraged. The brothers – who were highly edu­
cated (an option not open to young women at the time), and lived their entire life in
urban settings and partly in Copenhagen – used lexical borrowings relatively fre­
quently despite their access to the language discourse of the time, while their sisters,
who got little or no formal education, used them less frequently, especially their rural
half­sister. It should be noted, however, that these results come from private letters,
and other studies have shown that lexical borrowings were considerably less fre­
quent in formal texts from the same period, i.e. in published newspapers, though
they were more common in papers published in Reykjavík than elsewhere in Iceland.
A difference between informal, personal writings and formal, public texts has also
been attested in studies of modern Icelandic.
Ásta Svavarsdóttir
Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum
Laugavegi 13
IS-101 Reykjavík
asta.svavarsdóttir@arnastofnun.is / asta@hi.is
tunga_23.indb 68 16.06.2021 17:06:49