Orð og tunga - 2023, Qupperneq 76

Veturliði Óskarsson: Orð koma í orða stað 67
Lykilorð
erlend áhrif, máltengsl, tökuorð, blótsyrði, upphrópanir
Keywords
foreign influence, language contact, loanwords, swearwords, exclamations
Abstract
The article discusses the words fokka (verb) and fokk (noun) in Icelandic. These words
have a dual origin in the language. On the one hand, the verb was probably first
borrowed from older Danish or Low German already in the 17th century, and the
noun later derived from it. On the other hand, the much more recent loanword,
E. fuck (verb, noun, exclamation), took the same form in the language, both in
writing and pronunciation. This happened even though Icelandic phonotactics and
phonology require the short vowel in English words such as butter, hut, luck, etc. to
be represented by the Icel. phoneme /ö/, surfacing as [œ], when such words enter
the language as loanwords or are pronounced with an Icelandic accent. However,
the words fuck and fucking, which started appearing in Icelandic newspapers and
magazines around 1970, are almost always pronounced and spelt differently than
expected, i.e., with the vowel [ɔ] and spelt fokk, fokking, not with [œ] or spelt *fökk,
*fökking. The reason probably is that the older words to a certain extent, both in terms
of semantics, use and partly in pronunciation, already occupied the position that the
new loanwords were expected to take in the language. However, the older words,
fairly low valued, belonging to a low linguistic register and relatively rare, judging
from the texts that have been examined, gave in to the new words. The new words
were accompanied by pressure from popular culture, the language of young people
and supported by high international use and social media. This article discusses the
older words fokka and fokk, their history over the past centuries, their meaning, usage
and semantic development, and compares them with the newer words derived from
E. fuck who took their place, with examples taken to show what happened when the
new loanwords met the old ones.
Veturliði Óskarsson
Institutionen för nordiska språk
Uppsala universitet
veturlidi.oskarsson@nordiska.uu.se
tunga25.indb 67 08.06.2023 15:47:15