Related languages, convergence and replication: Faroese-Danish

Corresponding author:Hjalmar P. Petersen, Universität Hamburg, Research Center 538: Multilingualism, Max-Brauer-Allee 60, 22765 Hamburg, GermanyEmail: [email protected]

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International Journal of Bilingualism1 –20

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Related languages, convergence and replication: Faroese–Danish

Hjalmar P. PetersenUniversity of Hamburg, Germany

AbstractThe aim of this article is to present examples of a number of types of changes in Faroese that have come about under the influence of Danish. The majority of the residents of the Faroe Islands are bilingual in Faroese (L1) and Danish (L2). This has resulted in many loanwords, convergence and replication. The main topic of this article is convergence and replication, and we subscribe to a definition of convergence that stresses it as a one-way phenomenon, which involves the abstract level structure of a source language, and the surface-level patterns coming from the recipient language.

Keywordsbilingualism, convergence, language contact and replication

1. Introduction

Faroese and Danish are genetically related. Faroese is grouped as a West Scandinavian language, while Danish is an East Scandinavian language. The languages differ mainly in their phonology and morphology. One point is that Faroese has three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), Danish only two (common gender and neuter). This yields a quite different morphology, with different controller and target genders.

Faroese is usually grouped syntactically together with Icelandic as an Insular Scandinavian language as opposed to Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, which are Mainland Scandinavian (Vikner, 1995). Faroese often allows for both the Insular Scandinavian structure and the Mainland Scandinavian structure. For details see the section ‘A brief overview of the Faroese language situ-ation’ later in this article. This has come about as the result of centuries of intense language contact with Danish, so the isogrammatism, where L1 and L2 have almost identical syntactic patterns, unites and forms L2 sentences in L1.

There are no monolingual speakers on the Faroe Islands. All inhabitants master Danish with a high level of proficiency, but the bilingual situation is one of asymmetrical bilingualism. When I say asymmetrical bilingualism I mean that all speakers of Faroese speak Danish fluently, but very few Danes speak Faroese. Danish has had, and still has, a huge influence on Faroese, especially in syntax and lexicon, while Faroese does not have any influence on Danish.

2 International Journal of Bilingualism

The question is: What happens with related languages that have been in contact for centuries when only one of the languages, the more analytical one (Danish), influences the changing syn-thetic language (Faroese)? Anticipating the conclusion and the examples that will be presented, there are two outcomes and processes to be observed: (i) convergence and (ii) replication.1

I observe in my data that the ‘new’ structure will, sometime in the future, be the (converged) Danish analytical structure, simply because of the drift through which Faroese is gradually chang-ing from a synthetic to a more analytical language. This change is speeded up by language contact. Faroese changes according to the corresponding structure in Danish, and does so faster than if the contact situation were different.

I will mainly use the change of argument structure in ditransitive verbs to illustrate and discuss convergence, as in example (1b), and stranding, example (1c), to illustrate the replication data, although other structures are also included.

(1a) Jón gevur konuni ringin John(N) gives-3-Sg.-PreS. woman-the(D) ring-the(A) ‘John gives the woman the ring’

(1b) Jón gevur ringin til konuna John(N) gives-3Sg.-PreS. ring-the(A) to woman-the(A) ‘John gives the ring to the woman’

(1c) Hvaðani ert tú frá? whence are-3-Sg.PreS. you(N) from ‘Where are you from?’

The goal of this article is to present examples of changes that have come about in Faroese as a result of the influence of Danish. I will look at the outcome and the process of convergence and replication in a particular language setting, although it is well known that convergence is not restricted to this particular setting, being in fact universal, as numerous studies have shown.

Here we concentrate on the specific outcome in an asymmetrical bilingual situation that has existed for centuries. The data are part of a larger study on Faroese-Danish language contact. They are tentative and diagnostic; therefore I have not included all the different idioms, collocations and cases of convergence that I have found and which would require more space.

The article is organized as follows. After this short introduction, I introduce the terms conver-gence and replication; this is followed by a section on methodology, where I have included a short section about the bilingual language situation on the Faroe Islands. We then proceed to conver-gence and present the data. The convergence section deals with the change of argument structure in the ditransitive geva ‘to give’ and selja ‘to sell’, and the change from synthetic to analytical comparative. Then I proceed to replication, which is presented with stranding-examples, examples with replicated comparatives, de-venitive constructions, circumpositions and compound verbs. The final section presents a further discussion of the data and conclusions.

2. Convergence and replication

One way of looking at the data at hand would be to use the notion of congruent lexicalization (Muysken, 2000: 122), in which both languages share the grammatical structure of the sentence. The result is an A/B > a…b…a…b alternation as in (2), where there is a switch between the Ottersum dialect and Standard Dutch. A and B stand for different languages/dialects, and a…b for manifestations of these in a sentence.

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(2) ‘t geet vaak automatisch bij jou ‘It often goes automatically with you’ (Muysken 2000: 131(20))

The forward slash in A/B means that the structure is shared by the two varieties. This is what hap-pens in the Faroe–Danish language situation, where Faroese is the recipient language and Danish the source language. The only difference between (2) and my data is, that I do not find an instantia-tion of A/B as a…b…a…b, but as A/B…a…a…a, where A = Faroese, B = Danish, and a = Faroese. Both Faroese and Danish set, from time to time, the syntactic frame, hence A/B, but the pronuncia-tion of the sentences is in Faroese, hence a…a…a…a.

Another way of explaining the convergence data is to use Myers-Scotton’s definition of conver-gence, where it is said that convergence is (bold face in original):

speech by bilinguals that has all the surface-level forms from one language, but with part of the abstract lexical structure that underlies the surface-level patterns coming from another language (or languages). (Myers-Scotton, 2006: 271)

According to Myers-Scotton, convergence is a one-way phenomenon, although some mutual influ-ence is possible. Convergence, however, involves the grammar and lexicon of a source language, generally one that has greater socioeconomic prestige, impinging on another language (Myers-Scotton, 2002: 172).

My data confirm that convergence is a one-way phenomenon, where the abstract structure comes, from time to time, from Danish, which is the Embedded Language (EL), while the surface level structure is the one of the Matrix Language (ML, Faroese). Utterances showing convergence are thus created when a composite Matrix Language (Faroese and Danish) serves as the frame for the sentence (or in her words the frame of the CP involved).

Note further that Myers-Scotton sees convergence as both an outcome and a process. The out-come is the underlying abstract structure behind (1b) for example, where the verb to give has the argument structure NP + PP (Danish) and not the expected Faroese argument structure NAD as in (1a). As a process, convergence is a:

mechanism in the progressive outcome of attrition, language shift, language death, and creole formation. (Myers-Scotton, 2002: 101)

In the case of Faroese–Danish, convergence as a process is not attrition, language shift, language death or creole formation, but rather just a part of language maintenance, see the Conclusion and discussion section.

I will illustrate convergence using the ditransitive verbs geva ‘to give’ and selja ‘to sell’ and analytic comparatives. I distinguish between convergence and replication in this article. Both cases are transfers of a syntactic relation or syntactic relations from one language to the other, but con-vergence is strict borrowing, whereas replication has a mixed outcome. The result is neither the exact same pattern found in the model language (Danish) nor the same pattern observed in the replica language (Faroese).

Language replication is a process in which:

(a) Speakers notice that in language M there is a grammatical category Mx.(b) They create an equivalent category Rx in language R on the basis of the use patterns available in R.


(c) To this end, they replicate a grammaticalization process they assume to have taken place in language M, using an analogical formula of the kind [My > Mx]: [Ry > Rx].

(d) They grammaticalize Ry to Rx. [M = model language, R = replica language.]

(Heine & Kuteva, 2005: 92)

This formula was put forth in Heine & Kuteva (2005) in order to explain replica grammaticalization. As the formula shows, replication is not pure copying (see also Thomason & Kaufman, 1988: 62).

Replication will be illustrated mainly with the example of Faroese hvaðani ert tú frá? (lit.: whence are you from) = ‘where are you from?’, though I have also included other examples. In the stranding-construction the original adverb hvaðani ‘whence’ is used together with a stranded prep-osition frá ‘from’ instead of the proper Faroese hvaðani ert tú? ‘whence are you?’ or a borrowed hvar ert tú frá? ‘where are you from?’ (< Dan. hvor kommer du fra? ‘where are you from?’).

3. Methodology

The present study is based on data from the following sources: (i) semi-formal interviews from the K8 Corpus, (ii) grammatical judgment tests, (iii) a text-database and (iv) internet inquiries.

The K8 Corpus comprises semi-informal interviews that I conducted on the Faroe Islands in autumn 2005. I interviewed 30 informants as part of a larger project on Faroese–Danish bilingual-ism at the German Science Foundation’s Research Center 538: Multilingualism at Hamburg University. Fifteen of the informants were between the ages of 15 and 20 and fifteen were over 70. The informants spoke about different topics such as children’s games, school, confirmation, books, films, what they usually did in their spare-time, and so on. Each interview lasted at least 30 minutes and is transcribed in Praat.

We chose to interview these two generations as we hoped to find out whether one of them was influenced by Danish more than the other. The informants came from different dialectical areas of the Faroe Islands, which we hoped would answer the question of whether Danish influence was stronger in the capital Tórshavn, for example. The findings thus far have not yielded any results worth mentioning.

I have included the results from two tests in this article. One was conducted with upper second-ary school pupils in Tórshavn between the ages of 16 and 20, who came mainly from the area around the capital Tórshavn and from Vágar in the west. In this test I gave the informants the ques-tionnaire, which included the sentences I wanted to check as well as others, including sentences that were ungrammatical. The students were all seated in the classroom and had one hour to fill out the questionnaire. I stated clearly that they should rely on their own judgment and not what they had learned in school, for example. This was necessary, as there is a purist tradition on the Faroe Islands which would not accept sentences like give + NP + PP.

Scandinavian and non-Scandinavian linguists conducted field-work on the Faroe Islands in August 2008 as part of the ScanDiaSyn project, which investigates syntactic differences between Scandinavian languages. We traveled to six different locations on the Faroe Islands (Vágar, Tórshavn, Fuglafjørður, Klaksvík, Sandoy and Suðuroy). Among the field-work tactics were ques-tionnaires, which were distributed among nearly 200 informants. The informants had different levels of education and were from different age groups from 15 to over 56.

In our field-work we gathered people from the village(s) and brought them to a school or village hall. Sometimes there were up to 50 people, sometimes fewer, with each receiving the question-naire with the sentences presented in this article. As with the secondary-school pupils we stated

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explicitly that we wanted to test their judgment, not what they had been taught. We managed to obtain a total of 194 informants. As the research is based on informal interviews, one potential pitfall is that some of the constructions could be idiosyncratic. The grammaticality judgment test should ideally show that this is not the case. I have also searched for the constructions on the inter-net, in older Faroese ballad texts, in literary texts and newspapers.

Sometimes I was also able to search a database on the Faroe Islands, but that was not always possible due to simple geographical distance. I also have at my disposal a variety of different texts in Word and have searched for some of the constructions discussed in these texts. The texts repre-sent different genres such as the Ballad language (1400–1800), literary texts and more informal written Faroese, which is represented in the language of the newspapers.

3.1. A brief overview of the Faroese language situation

Faroese is a North Germanic language closely related to Icelandic. It is usually classified syntacti-cally as an Insular Scandinavian language compared to Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, which are Mainland Scandinavian languages (Vikner, 1995). Because of the bilingual language situation on the Faroe Islands, Faroese behaves at times, syntactically as well as in other parts of speech, very much like the Mainland Scandinavian languages. In other constructions it behaves more like a typi-cal Insular Scandinavian language.

One example in which Faroese allows both the Insular Scandinavian and the Mainland Scandinavian syntactic pattern is in sentences with or without the null expletive tað ‘there’. Icelandic does not allow the expletive það ‘there’, (3a). The situation is reversed in Danish, where the expletive is required, (3d). In Faroese it is possible to have an overt expletive (3c) and a con-struction with no expletive (3b). The sentence (3b) is structurally the same as the Icelandic sen-tence in (3a). The sentence (3c) is structurally the same as the Danish sentence in (3d).

(3a) Í gær var (* það) dansað á skipinu (Icl.) in yesterday was-3-PaSt-Sg. (*there) danced(SuP) on ship-the(D) ‘Yesterday there was dancing onboard the ship’

(3b) Í gjár varð dansað umborð á skipinum (Far.) in yesterday was-3-PaSt-Sg danced(SuP) onboard on ship-the(D) ‘Yesterday there was dancing onboard the ship’

(3c) Í gjár varð tað dansað umborð á skipinum (Far.) in yesterday was-3-PaSt-Sg there danced(SuP) onboard on ship-the(D) ‘Yesterday there was danced onboard on the ship’

(3d) I går blev der danset ombord på skibet (Dan.) in yesterday was-3-PaSt-Sg there danced(SuP) onboard on ship-the(Obl) ‘Yesterday there was dancing onboard the ship’

The Danish influence is obviously very salient in the lexicon. There is some influence on the pho-nological system and very little on the morphological system when we only look at new morphemes.

Some Danish influence exists in the phonological system. The lack of the u-umlaut is one example, as when one of the informants says skrapp instead of skrøpp, compare also Hamre (1944), where he mentions the phrase allum godum mannum lit.: ‘all good men’ from a book by Lucas


Debes from 1673 instead of øllum góðum monnum with ø and o in front of u. Three new vowel phonemes were also introduced into Faroese because of language contact. They are long /a:/ in for example statur ‘state’, long /y:/ in for example typa ‘type’ and /au:/ in aula ‘meeting hall’. It should be noted that these phonemes are only found in loanwords.

Lüdi (2000) distinguishes between (1) the monolingual and the bilingual language mode and (2) an exolinguistic and endolinguistic language mode. In the exolinguistic mode there is no balance between the languages with regard to language competence between speaker and hearer. Such a balance is observed in the endolinguistic mode.

Bilingual Monolingual

Exolingual Interaction among speakerswith different languages

Interaction between native and non-native speakers of the same language.

Endolingual Interaction among bilinguals

Interaction among monolinguals

The Faroe Islanders are endolingual and bilingual, where a balance exists between the two lan-guages. Danish is mastered almost as a native language, although differences are observed between individuals.

When we consider Fishman’s (1972) domains: family, friendship, religion, education and work, we observe that Danish today is mainly used in educational settings. The use of Danish is widespread, especially as a written medium. Danish is used generally as the language for subtitles on TV, in weekly magazines and advertising, books in general, on signs in stores, in manuals and so forth (Petersen, 2006). The Faroe Islanders speak Danish fluently and can write and read Danish without any problems whatsoever. The language situation is such that one cannot do with-out Danish on the Faroe Islands. Very illustrative of this fact is an interview with a woman from eastern Europe who married a Faroe Islander. In the newspaper Dimmalætting she says that one of her problems is that she has to master Danish in order to function on the islands.2

4. Convergence

Convergence, defined in Section 2 of this article ‘Convergence and replication’, promotes the splitting of abstract lexical structure in one variety and its combining with such abstract struc-ture from another variety. The result is a composite Matrix Language, where the surface mor-phemes come from the ML and the abstract structure comes from the EL (Myers-Scotton, 2002: 164).

Convergence is illustrated here with a change of argument structure by the ditransitive verbs at geva ‘to give’ and at selja ‘to sell’. I will show that the change follows a certain path, where animacy plays a role. Usually, the verb geva ‘to give’ as well as selja ‘to sell’ in modern Faroese require that the benefactive be in the dative and the theme in the accusative (Petersen & Adams, 2009, Thráinsson, Petersen, Jacobsen, & Hansen, 2004). When we compare Faroese with Icelandic it becomes clear that a PP complement for indirect objects of give-verbs is not pos-sible in Icelandic, see example (4c), although it is possible after verbs that express an actual movement of the direct object, such as in (4d) senda ‘to send’ (Thráinsson, 2007: 173–173). Faroese also allows NP + PP after verbs such as senda ‘to send’ (4e) and faksa ‘to fax’ (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 264).

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(4a) Jógvan gav konuni ein muss (Far.) John(N) gave-3Sg-PaSt woman-the(D) a kiss(A) ‘John gives the woman a kiss’

(4b) María gaf Haraldi bókina (Icl.) Mary(N) gave-3-Sg-PaSt Harold(D) book-the(A) ‘Mary gave Harold the book’

(4c) *María gaf bókina til Haraldar (Icl.) Mary(N) gave-3-Sg.PaSt book-the(A) to Harold(G) ‘Mary gave the book to Harold’

(4d) Haraldur sendi ost til mín (Icl.) Harold(N) sent-3-Sg.PaSt cheese(A) to me(G) ‘Harold sent cheese to me’

(4e) Jógvan sendi eitt bræv til hennara/hana (Far.) John(N) sent-3-Sg.PaSt a letter(A) to her(G)/to her(A) ‘John sent a letter to her’

Braunmüller (2001) and Jónsson (2008, 2009) argue that the dative is slowly disappearing from Faroese. These changes, however, will take years and generations before they fully replace older structures.

The following examples illustrate the change of a ditransitive verb. They are taken from the K8 Corpus, where a woman uses a prepositional phase instead of the expected dative-accusative con-struction, see (5c).

(5a) …so hevur mann givið ringin til onkran (K8 Corpus) …then has one(N) given(SuP) ring-the(A) to someone(A)

(5b) …så har man givet ringen til en eller anden (Dan.) …then has one(N) given(SuP) ring-the(OBL) to someone(OBL)

‘…then one has given the ring to someone’

(5c) …so hevur mann givið onkrum ringin. (Far.) …then has one(N) given(SUP) someone(D) ring-the(A) ‘…then has one given someone the ring.’

I searched the text-bank in Føroyamálsdeildin (Department of Faroese Language and Literature) in Tórshavn and found five examples out of a total 8271 with geva til, suggesting that a structure like the one in (5a) is not common in the colloquial language.

The change in (5a) is not idiosyncratic. It is a change that is currently happening in Faroese. See also a study by Jónsson (2008, 2009) involving 243 speakers of Faroese and my own fieldwork from 2008. Both studies are part of a project on the syntax of Scandinavian dialects (ScanDiaSyn). The speakers came from six different localities on the Faroe Islands and were presented with the sentences in example (6), among others. The results clearly show that in our case, (5a), we are not dealing with an isolated change.

Example (6a) includes the ditransitive verb selja ‘to sell’ + NPdat.

+ NPacc.

and 81 per cent of speakers accept this sentence construction. The number of speakers who accept a prepositional phrase is also high, as shown in (6b). Interesting for our case is (6d), which indeed shows that geva ‘to give’ may take a PP + NP.


(6a) Hann seldi konuni bilin. (81%) He(N) sold woman-the(D) car-the(A) ‘He sold the woman the car.’

(6b) Hann seldi húsini til Jógvan. (93%) He(N) sold house-the(A) to John(A) ‘He sold the house to John’

(6c) Hon gav Turið bókina (97.1%) She(N) gave Turið(D) book-the(A) ‘She gave Turið the book’

(6d) Hon gav troyggjuna til Mariu. (40%) She(N) gave sweater-the(A) to Mary(A) ‘She gave the sweater to Mary’ (Jónsson 2008b)

I also found examples with geva + PP + NP in written Faroese one of which is from a 1999 novel called Vónbrot ‘Disappointment’.

(7) …ella gevi eg tey til Frelsunarherin …or give I(N) them(A) to Salvation Army-the(A) ‘…or I give them [the clothes] to the Salvation Army’

The example in (7) is illustrative of the change from NP + NP to NP + PP + NP, as the NP Frelsunarherurin ‘The Salvation Army’ is an inanimate NP. Later I show that the ongoing change from dative to a prepositional phrase happens first in exactly this environment, see Figure 1.

The general tendency in Faroese, when compared with Icelandic, its closest relative, is that the dative is disappearing. Approximately 800 verbs take the dative in Icelandic. Of these, 250–300 are ditransitive according to Mailing (2002), as quoted in Jónsson (2008, 2009). In Faroese, around 400 verbs are listed as taking dative in Føroysk orðabók (Faroese Dictionary, 1998). Half of these verbs are ditransitive and 100 of these are still in use in spoken Faroese (Jónsson, 2008, 2009), based on information from field-work done by V. Absalonsen and H. á Løgmansbø. Borrowed verbs take the accusative as a rule in Faroese.

In August 2008 I, together with others, conducted fieldwork on the Faroe Islands. I distributed questionnaires among 194 informants from six different dialectical areas. The informants were of both sexes and aged from 15 to over 70. The results are presented in the Figure 1. It is clear that the new structure, the PP + NP, is most acceptable when the NP following the verb is inanimate (line f), after selja ‘to sell’ + a pronoun and a full NP (lines g and h), where the results are indicated in bold face. This corresponds with the findings in Jónsson (2008, 2009), at least with regard to selja ‘to sell’.

Figure 1 shows the result of a grammaticality judgment test conducted on different locations on the Faroe Islands in August 2008. The informants had four possibilities to choose between: (1) the sentence is totally grammatical, (2) the sentence is grammatical, but I would not use it myself, (3) the sentence is doubtful, and (4) the sentence is totally ungrammatical. The result shows clearly that the change is more accepted when the benefactive NP is an inanimate noun, that is: geva ’to give’ + an inanimate NP, (line f), and with selja ‘to sell’ and the pronoun mín ‘me’, and with selja + a full NP.

Another case of convergence is the analytic comparative, which is spreading in Faroese at the expense of the synthetic comparative. Compare also meist normale ‘most normal’ in Australian-German, which is modeled on Dut. meest normale and Engl. most normal, (Clyne, 2003: 107).

Petersen 9

An example of colloquial Faroese is taken from the discussion forum of the magazine kvinna.fo (woman.fo), where someone writes man er meira sjúkur, um ... ‘one is more sick, if ...’ (kvinna.fo, 2007) instead of man er sjúkari ‘one is sicker’, where -ari is the comparative suffix. The synthetic comparative is still very much alive and the most usual way of expressing the comparative in mod-ern Faroese (Petersen & Adams, 2009; Thráinsson et al., 2004), see also the following figures.

In Figure 2 I present the results of the judgment test I performed in August 2008 on the Faroe Islands. The adjectives sjúkur ‘sick’, neyvur ‘exact’ and fittligur ‘nice’ are found frequently in the language. The adjective fittiligur ‘nice’ was included because it is trisyllabic and has the suffix -lig (the -ur is the nominative ending). Originally I thought that an analytic comparative would be more readily accepted in this adjective than in the other two as in Norwegian, for example, where most adjectives with a suffix have an analytic comparative (Faarlund, Lie, & Vannebo, 2006: 358). This is not the case in Faroese.

The sentences I tested are presented in the following examples. Notice (8g), (8h) and (8i) with meira ‘more’ + the comparative suffix. I will return to them in the section on replication.

(8a) Mátingarnar í dag vóru neyvari enn tær í gjár measures-the(N) in day were exacter(COmP) than those in yesterday ‘The measures today were more exact than those yesterday’

(8b) Hendan bókin er fittligari enn hin this book-the(N) is nicer(COmP) than that ‘This book is nicer than that [one]’

(8c) Mátingarnar í dag vóru meira neyvar enn tær í gjár measures-the(N) in day were more excact than those(N) in yesterday ‘The measures today were more exact than those yesterday’

1 2 3 4 NA*

(a) Jón selur mær bókina 152 22 16 2 2 J(N) sells me(D) book-the(A)(b) Jón selur manninum bilin 147 32 8 5 2 J(N) sells man-the(D) car-the(A)(c) Jón gevur Frelsunarherinum klæðini 145 29 14 6 J(N) gives Salvation Army-the(D) clothes-the(A)(d) Jón gevur konuni bókina 150 16 20 6 2 J(N) gives woman-the(D) book-the-(A)(e) Jón gevur mær bókina 138 23 23 7 3 J(N) gives me(D) book-the(A)(f) Jón gevur klæðini til Frelsunarherin 131 25 26 8 4 J(N) gives clothes-the(A) to Salvation Army-the(A)(g) Jón selur bókina til mín 75 48 32 34 5 J(N) sells book-the(A) to me(A)(h) Jón selur bilin til mannin 80 35 51 26 2 J(N) sells car-the(A) to me(A)(i) Jón gevur bókina til konuna 45 37 54 57 1 J(N) gives book-the(A) to woman-the(A)(j) Jón gevur bókina til mín 27 32 53 78 4 J(N) gives book-the(A) to me(A)

Figure 1.* NA = not answered


(8d) Hetta barnið er meira sjúkt enn hatta this child(N) is more sick than that [one] ‘This child is sicker than that [one]’

(8e) Hetta barnið er sjúkari enn hatta barnið this child(N) is sicker(COmP) than that child-the(N) ‘This child is sicker than that child’

(8f) Hendan bókin er meira fittlig enn hin this book-the(N) is more nice than the other ‘This book is more nice than the other [one]‘

(8g) Mátingarnar í dag vóru meira neyvari enn tær í gjár measures-the(N) in day were more exact(COmP) than those in yesterday ‘Lit.: The measures today were more exacter than those yesterday’

(8h) Henda bókin er meira fittligari enn hin this book(N) is more nicer(COmP) than the other ‘Lit: This book is more nicer than the other’

(8i) Hetta barnið er meira sjúkari enn hatta this child(N) is more sicker(COmP) than that [one] ‘Lit.: This child is more sicker than that one’

The result of the judgment test is shown in Figure 2, which shows that meira ‘more’ + Adj. is read-ily accepted in front of sjúkur ‘sick’, as well as neyvur ‘exact’.

5. Replication

As noted earlier, I distinguish between convergence and replication. In convergence a structure from L2 is transferred into L1 directly; it is a case of borrowing. The same occurs in replication but with the difference that the outcome is not a direct copy of the corresponding structure in the donor language and does not correspond to the pattern in the borrowing language.

One question in grammaticalization theory is how grammatical forms and constructions arise and develop through time and space with the goal of trying to explain why they are structured the way they are (Heine & Kuteva, 2005: 80). Heine & Kuteva set up four parameters of grammatical-ization: extension, desemanticization, decategorization and erosion, of which desemanticization (or semantic bleaching) is relevant for our understanding of the examples with hvaðani ‘whence’. Semantic bleaching is loss (or generalization) in meaning content. I will illustrate replication in terms of stranding in (i) hvaðani ... frá lit.: whence ... from, (ii) analytic comparatives, (iii) de-venitive construction, (iv) a circumpositions and (v) a compound verb.

A stranded preposition is one that has been separated from its complement by movement of the complement (Radford, 2004: 477). An example of stranding in English is where are you from? In this sentence it is assumed that the wh-word has moved from its base position to the CP and that the preposition from is left stranded at the end of the sentence, that is: [CP where [C are [IP you [PP from [P where]. A comparable Faroese example is (9e), while (9b) has a special status, as we will see.

We shall look more closely at (9) in this section, where we show that the adverb hvaðani ‘whence’, as in (9a), was the main form in older Faroese, and still is in written Faroese, but the adverb is gradu-ally being replaced by either hvaðani .. frá (lit.: whence ... from, (9b), by the corresponding Danish constructions hvorfra ‘wherefrom’ (= Far. hvarfrá ‘wherefrom’, (9c), and Danish hvor ... fra ‘where

Petersen 11

... from (= Far. hvar ... frá ‘where ... from’, (9e). Note that only hvorfra ‘wherefrom’, (9d), and hvor

... fra ‘where ... from’, (9f) are found in Modern Danish and not an adverb like hvaðani ‘whence’. Another form is also possible, namely a mixed hvaðanifrá lit.: whencefrom as in (9g), compare the Danish sentence in (9d), which is borrowed into Faroese as (9c):

(9a) Hvaðani ert tú? (Far.) [CP hvaðani [C ert [TP tú … [AdvP hvaðani]]]] lit.: whence are you ‘Where are you from?’

(9b) Hvaðani ert tú frá? (Far.) [CP hvaðani [C ert [TP tú … [PP frá [P hvaðani]]]]] lit.: whence are you from ‘Where are you from?’

(9c) Hvarfrá ert tú? (Far.) [CP hvarfrá [CP ert [TP tú … [PP frá [P hvar ]]]]] lit.: where-from are you ‘Where are you from?’

1 2 3 4 NA*

(a) Mátingarnar í dag vóru neyvari enn tær í gjár 152 27 8 2 6measures-the(N) in day were exact(Comp) than thosein yesterday‘The measures today were more exact than those yesterday.’

(b) Hendan bókin er fittligari enn hin 122 40 17 14 2this book(N) is nicer(Comp) than that(N)‘This book is nicer than that [one].’

(c) Mátingarnar í dag vóru meira neyvar enn tær í gjár 109 37 25 21 3measures(N) in day were more exact than those in yesterday‘The measures today were more exact than those yesterday.’

(d) Hetta barnið er meira sjúkt enn hatta 68 59 45 19 4this child(N) is more sick than that‘This child is more sick than that [one]..’

(e) Hetta barnið er sjúkari enn hatta barnið 83 43 55 12 2this child(N) is sick(Comp) than that child‘This child is sicker than that child.’

(f) Henda bókin er meira fittlig enn hin 50 50 59 35 1this book(N) is more nice than that [one]‘This book is more nice than that.’

(g) Mátingarnar í dag vóru meira neyvari enn tær í gjár 15 26 52 99 3measures(N) in day were more exact(Comp) than those inyesterday

(h) Hendan bókin er meira fittligari enn hin 17 19 51 104 4this book(N) is more nice(Comp) than that

(i) Hetta barnið er meira sjúkari enn hatta 10 11 33 140 1this child(N) is more sick(Comp) than that

Figure 2. Examples with synthetic and analytic comparatives from the judgment test I performed in August 2008. (1) The sentence is grammatical; (2) the sentence is grammatical, but I would not use it myself, (3) the sentence is doubtful; and (4) the sentence is totally ungrammatical.

* NA = not answered


(9d) Hvorfra kommer du? (Dan.) lit. where-from come you ‘Where are you from?’

(9e) Hvar ert tú frá? (Far.) [CP hvar [C ert [TP tú … [PP frá [P hvar]]]]] ‘Where are you from?’

(9f) Hvor kommer du fra? (Dan.) lit.: where come you from? ‘Where are you from?’

(9g) Hvaðanifrá ert tú? (Far.) lit.: whencefrom are you? ‘Where are you from?’

In language contact it is often the case that a structure from the model language is not merely borrowed or copied into the borrowing language or the replica language (Heine & Kuteva, 2005: 81; Thomason & Kaufmann, 1988: 62). Examples (9b) and (9g) are good examples of replication, where speakers of the replica language, Faroese, notice a certain pattern in the model language. In this case it is the Danish structure hvor ... fra ‘where ... from’, see (9f). The next step is that speakers create (and not copy) a corresponding structure in the replica language. Based on the Danish prepositional phrases, speakers of Faroese have created an equivalent category Rx in the replica language R (Faroese) using material available in the replica language (Faroese) R, (see Heine & Kuteva, 2005: 92). In this case the adverb hvaðani ‘whence’ and the preposition frá ‘from’ are available, resulting in [PP frá [P hvaðani]].

This change is made possible because of semantic bleaching, as the meaning ‘from’ is gradually disappearing from the adverb hvaðani ‘whence’. The development is shown in Figure 3.

I was unable to find examples in my transcripts of spoken Faroese with the adverb hvaðani ‘whence’, but did find one with hvaðani ... frá lit. ‘whence ... from’, and also examples with hvar ... frá ‘where ... from’. Note the exact corresponding Danish sentence in (10c).

(10a) Eg veit ikki, hvaðani hann fekk tað frá (K8) I(N) know not whence he(N) got it(A) from ‘I don’t know where he got it from’

(10b) Eg veit ikki, hvar eg havi lært danskt frá. (K8) I(N) know not, where I(N) have learned Danish(A) from ‘I don’t know where I have learned Danish from’

(10c) Jeg ved ikke, hvor jeg har lært dansk fra (Dan.) I(N) know not, where I(N) have learned Danish(Obl) fra ‘I don’t know where I have learned Danish from’

I II IIIAdverb Grammaticalization Replacement

hvaðan(i) hvaðan(i)…frá hvar…frá‘whence’ ‘whence…from’ ‘where…from’

hvaðanifrá hvarfrá‘whencefrom’ ‘wherefrom’

Figure 3.

Petersen 13

Example (10a) is not the only instance of hvaðani ... frá ‘whence ... from’ in Faroese. If one searches for hvaðani frá site: fo on the internet the result is 15 cases with hvaðani ... frá.3 The construction is definitely not idiosyncratic, as the results of the grammaticality judgment test also show, see later.

In written Faroese hvaðani ‘whence’ is preferred to hvar ... frá ‘where ... from’ and hvaðani ... frá ‘whence ... from’, as the results given later indicate.4 The Ballad Language represents older Faroese (1400–1800). The literary texts represent some kind of high or higher standard than the language in newspapers, which is often more similar to the spoken language without always being pure spoken colloquial Faroese.

It is worth noting that only the adverb hvaðan ‘whence’ is allowed in Icelandic, the closest rela-tive of Faroese, and in Old Norse, an ancestor of Faroese. This, together with the Ballad Language, shows that hvaðani(i) ‘whence’ was preferred in older Faroese, as was the adverb hveden ‘whence’ in Old Danish.

Note that the structure hvaðani ... frá (lit. whence ... from) ‘where from’ was already present in the Ballad Language. Although the numbers are small, they illustrate, taken together with hvaðani ‘whence’, the path of grammaticalization. There are only four occurrences of hvaðani ... frá ‘whence ... from’ in the Ballad Language and four in the newspapers I analyzed. None were found in the literary language and only one in the spoken data.

A note of caution is needed here, however, as we have different genres. The data from the news-papers indicate that hvaðani is used more often in written Faroese (and in the ballads). Note also that rhyme may require certain constructions with hvaðani in the Ballad Language.

I take hvaðani ... frá to be an example of grammaticalization influenced by Danish hvor ... fra, although I cannot rule out simple drift, compare how the use of prepositions supported the break-down of the inflectional system in the development from Old English to Middle English (Lundskær-Nielsen, 1993). The results from the Ballad Language to modern Faroese show a clear decrease in the use of the adverb. I will return to the notion of drift in the ‘Conclusion and discussion’ section.

0

50

100

150

200

hvaðani 162 29 66 0

hvaðani...frá 4 0 4 1

hvar...frá 1 1 6 2

Ballad lg. Written lg. Newspapers Spoken lg.

Figure 4. The use of hvaðani ‘whence’, hvaðani ... frá ‘whence ... from’ and hvar...frá ‘where...from’ in the Ballad Language, in novels, newspapers and spoken Faroese, where spoken Far. is represented by the K8 database. The number is so low in spoken Far. simply because the construction is not very common.


The results of the grammaticality judgment test I conducted in August 2008 are presented in Figure 5.

The adverb hvaðani ‘whence’ is very much alive in modern Faroese, followed by the borrowed Danish construction hvar ... frá ‘where ... from’, as shown by the numbers in (a) and (b). This is not surprising, as the change from adverb to a pure stranded construction will take generations. The numbers show that the replicated structure with the adverb hvaðani ‘whence’ + a stranded preposi-tion was not found by speakers to be ungrammatical; 77 + 60 accept the construction. We see also that people are more doubtful with regard to the composite form hvaðanifrá ‘whencefrom’.

Two things happen here. One is a plain borrowing of the Danish structure (b), the other is repli-cation (c), and these constructions exist side by side with the ‘genuine’ Faroese construction.

As became clear in the section on convergence, an analytic comparative is widely accepted in Faroese. A colleague pointed out a form that he had witnessed in which the speaker talked about a football team.

(11) Hitt liðið var nógv meira neyvari the other team-the(N) was much more exact(COmP) lit.: The other team was much more exacter ‘The other team was much more exact’

In (11) we have both the adverb meira ‘more’ and a comparative form of the adjective, which is expressed in the -ari suffix in neyvari.

The August 2008 fieldwork and tests revealed that people generally do not accept such forms as readily, although some do not find it ungrammatical. In this case, it is a further example of replica-tion, as it is understood in this article.

According to Dahl (2000: 320) a de-venitive construction is a way of expressing the future by means of the verb ‘come’. In Europe, the constructions are found in two gram5 families, the Scandinavian and Romansh dialects and have developed independently in both families. Of the Scandinavian languages, de-venitive exists in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, (Dahl, 2000: 320). The original construction was:

(12) kommer til(l) at(t) <full verb> come INF to INFM

1 2 3 4 NA

(a) Hvaðani ert tú? 120 63 5 1 1‘Whence are you?’

(b) Hvar ert tú frá? 109 27 26 26 2‘Where are you from?’

(c) Hvaðani ert tú frá? 77 60 28 22 3whence are you from?‘Where are you from?’

(d) Hvaðanifrá ert tú? 35 48 46 56 5whencefrom are you?‘Wherefrom are you?

Figure 5. The results from the questionnaires: (1) the sentence is grammatical; (2) the sentence is grammatical, but I would not use it myself; (3) the sentence is doubtful; (4) the sentence is totally ungrammatical

Petersen 15

This has changed in Swedish so that till ‘to’ has been dropped. Additionally, the tendency exists in the colloquial language to drop the infinitive marker as well.

The Scandinavian construction is borrowed into Finnish as tulla ‘come’ + illative of the 3rd infini-tive (-maan), as Anna tulee sanomaan, että Intia on hyvä ‘Anna is going to say that India is good’.

De-venitive constructions are replicated in Faroese based on Danish but without the preposition til ‘to’, just as in Swedish.

The informant in (13a) refers to what she thinks another informant in the same village is going to tell me about a certain matter later that same day.

As we noted for the case of stranding constructions, replication is not just copying, as the prepo-sition til ‘to’ is dropped in Faroese.

(13a) Anna, hon kemur nokk at siga nakað heilt annað, tí Anna(N), she(N) comes-3-Sg perhaps to say(Inf) something completely different, because (K8) ‘Anna is probably going to tell [you] [something completely different, because…’

(13b) Anna, hun kommer nok til at sige noget helt andet, fordi Anna(N), she(N) comes-3-Sg perhaps to (Prt) to say(Inf)something completely different, because… (Dan.) ‘Anne is probably going to tell [you] something completely different, because…’

I performed grammaticality judgment tests with pupils in an upper-secondary school on the Faroe Islands in March 2008. The pupils were between the ages of 17 and 22 and their analyses of the two sentences are shown in Figure 7.

The results in Figure 7 show that both constructions are accepted in Faroese – that is, both the borrowed Danish construction (a) and the replicated construction (b). Faroese has borrowed two circumpositions from Danish, av ... til ‘from ... to’ in (14a) and frá ... av ‘from ... of’ in (14c), and replicated two: við ... fyri ‘with ... off’ and við ... frá ‘with ... on’ in (14e).

(14a) Far av helviti til! (Far.) go(IMP) from hell(D) to! ‘Go to hell!’

(14b) Gå ad helvede til! (Dan.) go(IMP) to hell to! ‘Go to hell’

1 2 3 4 NA

(a) Mátingarnar í dag vóru meira neyvari enn tær í gjár 15 26 52 99 3 measures(N) in day were more exact(Comp) than those in yesterday(b) Hendan bókin er meira fittligari enn hin 17 19 51 104 4 this book(N) is more nice(Comp) than that(c) Hetta barnið er meira sjúkari enn hatta 10 11 33 140 1 this child(N) is more sick(Comp) than that

Figure 6.


(14c) Frá ungum árum av (Far.) from young(D) age(D) of ‘From young age of’

(14d) Fra ung af (Dan.) from young of ‘From young age of’

(14e) Bilurin bíðaði við motorinum fyri/frá (Far.) car-the(N) waited with engine-the(D) on/off ‘The car waited with the engine on/off’

(14f) Bilen ventede med motoren i gang (Dan.) car-the(N) waited with engine-the in going ‘The car waited with the engine on’

The circumpositions in (14c) are a simple borrowing from Danish fra ... af ‘from ... of’.The example in (14a) does not make any sense at all semantically. Here, speakers of Faroese

have used the Faroese preposition, which is phonetically most like the Danish ad ‘to’ and have come up with Faroese av ‘from’.

Replication can be seen in (14e), where speakers use the borrowed Danish circumpositions in (14a) and Danish circumpositions in general and replicated the patterns. Speakers of Faroese have, in a sense, noted the circumpositions fra ... af ‘from ... of’ in Danish, and aim to create a similar structure in Faroese. One way of accomplishing this is simply by using borrowing, the other being to use an analogous formula, where they find circumpositions in Danish and use these formulas in Faroese, yielding, for example, við ... frá/fyri as in (14e).

I would like to draw attention to Example (15), which is taken from the K8 Corpus. It comes from a young girl who speaks Danish, her first L2, and she says:

(15) Hvis de skal være gode, så må de begynde fra skrot af if they want be good, then must they(N) start(INF) from scratch of ‘If they want to be good, then they must start from scratch’

The result of the judgment test. Sentence (a) corresponds to example (I), and (b) to (II)

(1) Margret, hon kemur helst at siga nakað annað Margret(N) she(N) comes-3.-Sg. perhaps to say(Inf) something different ‘Margret, she is probably going to tell you something different’.(2) Margret, hon kemur helst til at siga nakað annað Margret(N) she(N) comes-3-Sg. perhaps to(prt) to say(Inf) something different ‘Margret, she is probably going to tell you something different.’

The result of the judgment test. Sentence (a) corresponds to example (I) , and (b) to (II)

1 2 3 4

(a) Margret, hon kemur helst at siga nakað annað 8 10 12 5(b) Margret, hon kemur helst til at siga nakað annað 11 9 8 7

Figure 7. The results of the grammaticality judgment test are from an upper-secondary school on the Faroe Islands, in which de-venitive constructions were included. The informants again had four possibilities to choose from: (1) the sentence is grammatical, (2) the sentence is grammatical, but I would not use it myself, (3) the sentence is doubtful and (4) the sentence is ungrammatical. Examples (I) and (II) give the meaning of the sentences

Petersen 17

The expression start from scratch does not exist in Danish. It is expressed by begynde på bar bund lit.: start on bare bottom = ‘start from scratch’. The speaker models (15) on other circumpositions, either in Faroese or Danish, or both, and creates a new one, one that does not exist in Danish or Faroese – and perhaps not even English.

Petersen & Adams (2009: 196–202) mention 131 compound verbs that are borrowed from Danish or are calques; these all have a corresponding Faroese verb + particle construction as the borrowed compound Far. útgera, that is, út- ‘out’ + gera ‘do’ ‘equip’ < Dan. udgøre (ud- ‘out’ + gore ‘do’) and the corresponding Far. verb + particle gera út lit.: ‘do’ + ‘out’ = ‘equip’.

There are 111 borrowed compound verbs (or calques) such as niðurgera < Dan. nedgøre lit.: down + do ‘crush’ that exist, as do 63 instances of verb + part. This shows that the frequency of these compounds is increasing in the colloquial language.

The Danish compound foregå lit.: fore + go ‘occur, happen’ is borrowed in example (16) into Faroese as fyriganga lit.: fore + go ‘occur, happen’. The corresponding Faroese verb + particle is more complex, as it also has a reflexive pronoun: ganga fyri seg lit.: go fore SELF ‘occur, happen’. The reflexive pronoun becomes part of the compound Danish verb, resulting in fyrig-anga seg lit.: fore + go + SELF, as in (16a), where a woman talks about school and the fact that all of the books that they used were in Danish. As we see in (16b), the reflexive is not present in Standard Danish.

(16a) Alt fyrigekk seg á donskum. (K8) all(N) forewent self(A) on Danish(D) ‘Everything was in Danish’(16b) Alt foregik på dansk (Dan.) all(N) forewent on Danish(Obl.) ‘Everything was in Danish’(16c) Alt gekk fyri seg á donskum. (Far.) all(N) went fore self on Danish(D) ‘Everything was in Danish’

6. Conclusion and discussion

Faroese and Danish have been in contact for centuries. The contact situation is one of asymmetrical bilingualism, where Danish has had and still has a considerable influence on the Faroese syntax and lexicon but Faroese does not have any influence on Danish. The result of the language contact situation is mainly convergence and replication, although we find a few code-switches, though only in collocates. I will exclude these from the present discussion, as they are not of interest to us in the context of this study.

Both convergence and replication are examples of transfer of Embedded-Language structures (Danish) into the Matrix Language (Faroese). In her definition of convergence Myers-Scotton says that convergence as a process ‘is a mechanism in the progressive outcomes of attrition, language shift, language death, and creole formation’ (Myers-Scotton, 2002: 101). But note also that convergence happens gradually over several generations (Myers-Scotton, 2002: 172), which is confirmed by my data, as for example both ditransitive structures and PP + NP exist side by side; compare also stranding and the adverb, which also exist side by side. I would like to point out that the result of convergence in the present case is language maintenance, where the stable bilingual language situation leads to cases with convergence/replication and a composite Matrix Language.


Structurally, the only difference between convergence and replication is that in the former we observe total adaptation to a pre-existing Faroese construction, (4e), while replication involves borrowing of Danish hvor ... fra ‘where ... from’, which is then imitated as hvaðani ... frá lit.: whence ... from. As an outcome, both are the same; that is, both are linguistic configurations with all surface morphemes coming from the ML, but with parts of the abstract lexical structure from another language, the EL.

The same happens in the case of circumpositions and de-venitive constructions, but in these cases the constructions add a structure to the existing system, as Faroese did not previously exhibit these structures.

Convergence does not necessarily happen in a setting where the source language has greater socioeconomic prestige (Myers-Scotton, 2002: 172). In the Faroese–Danish language situation on the Faroe Islands, it is practical to know and use Danish, as such things as manuals for instance are written in Danish, as are different novels and many school-books, weekly magazines and subtexts in TV and so on. Danish does not have a greater prestige than Faroese, although that was the case in the 1800s and at the beginning of the 1900s.

A concept like Sapir’s drift has not been discussed in connection with the changes, although the change of the argument structure of ditransitive verbs and the stranded construction do show a drift. Sapir (1921) defined drift as the general trend of a language to keep changing in a certain direction over many generations. This is exactly what happens in some of the constructions consid-ered here, as the change is from a synthetic to a more analytical language.

One anonymous reviewer points out that the linguistic distance between the languages exercises some influence on the contact outcome that occurs. The only answer to this is that there are two mechanisms at play in this particular language setting. One is that a structure is directly transferred from the source language into the recipient language (convergence), the other that a structure in the source language is imitated (replication). Surface-level patterns come from another language.

Danish influence is seen in other aspects of Faroese such as in the phonological system, where we see, for example, three new vowel phonemes in loanwords, as well as in the lexicon and syntax, although the influence in the morphology is slighter (Petersen, 2008). As this is the case, Danish influence on the constructions considered here cannot be ruled out, or, to put it in the words of Dahl (2001: 1469):

In other words, while the chance that a certain morpheme or construction in a language will undergo a particular kind of grammaticalization is on the whole rather small, the probability increases dramatically if a neighboring language undergoes the process in question.

In our particular case, the languages are not neighboring languages. In the short section earlier in this article ‘A brief overview of the Faroese language situation,’ however, it became clear that Danish and Faroese have been in contact for centuries and that Danish is present everywhere on the Faroe Islands. Dahl’s statement, showing that a neighboring language undergoes the process in question, is also relevant in our case, as Danish has undergone the processes we now observe in Faroese, which is becoming in turn a more and more analytical language. The changes are acceler-ated by language contact. Faroese changes according to changes in the same structures in Danish and it does so faster because of the contact situation. The first part of Dahl’s statement, indicating that a particular kind of grammaticalization is on the whole rather small, is confirmed when we compare Faroese with Icelandic, the closest relative of Faroese. In Icelandic we do not see the same changes that are currently occurring in Faroese, the reason being that Icelandic does not have con-tact with Danish to the extent that Faroese does. Icelandic has also a written tradition dating from around 1100, compared to the Faroese written standard from 1896.

Petersen 19

Returning to the notion of drift and external influence, I conclude by claiming that the changes we are currently observing in Faroese are the result of a combination of internal drift supported by an external factor, namely Danish.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for comments on this article. Also A. MacDougall for proof-reading the English, and Carol Myers-Scotton for comments on earlier versions of this article. All mistakes are of course mine.

Notes

1. What I here call convergence and replication equals the distinction between matter borrowings and pat-tern borrowings in Sakel (2007: 15). MAT-borrowings are when we find morphological material and the phonological shape from one language in another language. PAT is when only the patterns of the other language are replicated (Sakel, 2007: 15). As I use Heine & Kuteva’s formula, I will stick to replication in this article, where replication is PAT borrowings.

2. See Dimmalætting 19 September 2007.3. The sites found had URLs as follows (all accessed 22 January 2009) www.logir.fo/foldb/kunfo/2010/0000031.htm www.brl.fo/index.asp?id=%7B013212D2-9483-4B52-BD1D-65540E057698% 7D http://www.kvinna.fo/Default.aspx?pageid www.elektron.fo/logtingsmál www.sandportal.fo/politikkur/kommunupolitikkur/spurningar-i-ikki-eru-settir- enn.aspx www.logting.fo/casewritten/view.gebs?caseWritten.id=34 - web.kaerustovnur.fo/pdf/sak1546.pdf www.jesus.fo/kjak/default.asp?p=forum&m=topic&id...2 www.taks.fo/00007/00273/00470/ www.uf.fo/zip/um.asp?ID=35 www.samband.fo/sambandfo/print.asp?id=1481 www.genealogi.fo/default.asp?action=kjaktorg&sida...3... www.torshavn.fo/Default.aspx?pageid=609&NewsItemID www.vestmanna.fo www.new.vagaportal.fo/pages/.../folk-eru-evakuerad-i-midvagi-6011.php?...4. The excerpts are from the newspapers Dimmalætting and Sosialurin (December 1997, January 1998 and

November 2000) and different literary texts. I am thankful to Sjúrður Gullbein for providing me with a database with these different texts and in addition to many others.

5. ‘Gram families’ is used ‘for grams with related functions and diachronic sources that show up in geneti-cally and/or geographically related groups of languages’ (Dahl, 2000: 317).

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Related languages, convergence and replication: Faroese-Danish

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