En undersøgelse af udtalen i færødansk og gøtudansk i to generationer

Abstract

The focus of this study is to examine the Danish spoken language as it is spoken on the Faroe Islands. The Faroe Islanders are bilinguals due to a long history of language contact between the two countries (Petersen 2010). However, there are two pronunciations of Danish on the Faroe Islands. The first one, called Faro-Danish, is Faroese-accented Danish, while the second one, called Gøtu-Danish (lit.: Street-Danish), is a conventionalized variety with many Faroese phonological features (Petersen 2009). In a previous study together with colleagues I examined pre-aspiration and sonorant devoicing in these two pronunciations of Danish and found that these two features exist in both pronunciations but to a greater extent in Gøtu-Danish (Debess, Saxov & Thomsen 2013). This is the only study to have examined the pronunciation of the Danish language on the Faroe Islands in a systematic way. In addition to that, Kühl (2015) and Petersen (2008, 2009, 2010) have noticed other features, e.g. more centralized vowels and alveolar approximant /r/ instead of the Danish uvular /r/. The aim of this study is to contribute to widening the description of the Danish language on the Faroe Islands by examining the following five variables in the two pronunciations: /d/, /r/, pre-aspiration, sonorant devoicing and orthographic influence from the letter . I have examined both reading style and spontaneous speech, and I used both quantitative and qualitative data. To analyze the variables I used an auditory approach supported by acoustic analysis. I found that there was a difference in awareness among the islanders as regards the five variables, and that the variables of which they were aware - /r/, /d/ and orthographic influence from the letter - had less influence from Faroese. I also found that the older generation had more influence from Faroese than the younger generation in all the variables, and lastly I found that there was more influence from Faroese in Gøtu-Danish than in Faro-Danish.

Date of Award	1 Jul 2016
Original language	Danish
Awarding Institution	University of Copenhagen
Supervisor	University Copenhagen (Supervisor) & Nicolai Pharao (Supervisor)