Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 173

selves comprehend and experience the dialectal variations.12
Alf Sommerfelt (1968:490-493) has emphasized the socio-
dialectal functions of phonemic and phonetic distinctions:
‘Phonemic and phonetic traits, however, enter also into the
complex of factors of which the speakers are fully conscious
and which they in many cases use in order to render apparent
their social position, either as a member of a community,
whether it be a politically independent one or a part of a
greater socio-political entity, or of a class, caste or group.
Different geographical dialects are often spotted through pho-
netic/phonemic traits.’ In Netherlandish (i.e., Dutch and Fle-
mish) dialect geography, the awareness of dialect speakers,
het dialectsprekersbewustzijn, has for a long time been discussed
and used as a basis for grouping and dividing the dialects
of a language area (Weijnen 1958:138-141 and 1968 with
references). It is also worth mentioning that the Swedish dia-
lectologist, later minister of finance, Ernst Wigforss (1913-
18:637) in evaluating isoglosses and dialect boundaries as
early as 1918 pointed out the fact that, on an objective basis,
he had arrived at the same geographical units as those which
dialect speakers themselves considered as quite uniform.
In my opinion human language is a means of conceptualiza-
tion and communication in the form of a partly innate and
partly acquired system of rules and signs with cognitive,
emotive, and social meaning (cf. Dahlstedt 1964:67).
Thus language has two social qualities. One is well-known.
It implies that language communicates, i.e., transfers, thoughts
12Jaberg 1936:103: ‘. . . tout patoisant est polyglotte: il ne parle en général,
il est vrai, que son propre patois; mais il connait le patois de ses voisins; il en
remarque les particularités, il s’en étonne, il l’admire, il s’en moque, il le déteste
—il n’y reste jamais indifférent’; cf. Dahlstedt 1958 and 1964:68 and Haugen
19671332 and 341. Obviously Weinreich is wrong in the following quotation:
‘On the level of non-standardized or folk lanouage, a discrete difference be-
tween one variety and others is not a part of the experience of its speakers .. . ’
(‘9541396, cf. partly otherwise on Yiddish p. 394). Labov (1966:8 and 21)
holds that ‘the social significance’ of speech forms is more or less conscious to
the language user.