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Faroese Language

Faroese is one of the Scandinavian languages and is closest to Icelandic in phonetic and morphological aspects. It is the official language of the Faroe Islands, an autonomous region of Denmark, where approximately 48,000 people speak it natively. While Denmark historically suppressed the Faroese language, the people preserved it orally until a writing system was developed in 1846. Faroese became the primary language of schools in 1937 and was recognized as the national language in 1948. Today it is the primary language of media and advertising, though Danish remains compulsory in schools and is still spoken natively by about 5% of Faroese.

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115 views

Faroese Language

Faroese is one of the Scandinavian languages and is closest to Icelandic in phonetic and morphological aspects. It is the official language of the Faroe Islands, an autonomous region of Denmark, where approximately 48,000 people speak it natively. While Denmark historically suppressed the Faroese language, the people preserved it orally until a writing system was developed in 1846. Faroese became the primary language of schools in 1937 and was recognized as the national language in 1948. Today it is the primary language of media and advertising, though Danish remains compulsory in schools and is still spoken natively by about 5% of Faroese.

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Вікторія Макар
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FAROESE LANGUAGE

Presented by Viktoriia Makar


INTRODUCTION

Faroese (føroyskt) is one of the Scandinavian languages. In phonetic


and morphological aspects, it is closest to Icelandic. It is the official
language of the Faroe Islands (an autonomous region belonging to
Denmark). The total number of Faroese speakers is approximately
48,000 in the Faroe Islands and 12,000 in Denmark.
HISTORY
An independent Faroese language emerged between the 9th and 14th centuries.
Since the Reformation, Denmark, which ruled the Faroe Islands, has banned the
teaching of Faroese in schools, as well as its use in the church and in official
documents, imposing the Danish language everywhere. However, the Faroese did
not abandon their native language, continuing to use it in everyday communication
and passing on ancient ballads and fairy tales by word of mouth. This allowed them
to preserve the oral tradition of the Faroese language, despite the fact that writing
in Faroese was prohibited for 300 years.

In 1846, W. W. Hammershaimb developed a writing system for the Faroese


language that still exists today.

In 1937, the Faroese language replaced Danish in school teaching, and in 1948, Faroese
was recognised as the national language. However, it was only in the 1980s that Faroese
became the language of media and advertising. Today, Danish is considered a foreign
language, although 5% of the Faroese still learn it as a first language, and it is compulsory
at school from the 3rd grade onwards.
SOME CHARACTERISTICS
OF THE FAROESE
LANGUAGE.

A brief survey of some of the characteristics of Faroese will be given here. As a


principal rule in Faroese words, the stress falls on the first syllable. There are a
few exceptions in words beginning with a prefix. For foreign words and
loanwords the stress often falls on a later syllable, usually as in the original
language, e.g. studentur (student), banan (banana), motorur (engine), betala
(pay), fortelja (tell). Faroese has to a great extent preserved the system of
inflection which was found in Norse, however with some simplifications.
A distinction is made between the three genders. Words have four cases:
nominative, accusative, dative and genitive, and singular and plural; and thus,
theoretically, a noun can have 8 inflected forms, and if the definite forms are
included there are 16 theoretical possibilities (in practice, however, many forms
are similar). Of the four cases, the genitive case has a very limited application,
especially in the spoken language, where it is usually replaced by paraphrases
with propositions. For example, "The man's house" is Húsið hjá manninum.
However, in the written language, and in particular the more elevated style, e.g.
scriptural style, the genitive case is often used, and purists have done much to
reintroduce the genitive forms.
THE VOCABULARY
The nucleus of the Faroese vocabulary is of Norse origin and has parallels in the neighbouring languages. As
mentioned before, a small number of words (and place names) are of Celtic origin and testify to an early
connection with Gaelic-speaking people in the British Isles.
In the late Middle Ages and after the Reformation, Faroese received a large addition of Danish and Low
German words (the latter usually through Danish), not least in religious usage (e.g. begynna (begin), betala
(pay), bevara (preserve), forráða (betray), gemeinur (common), sannheit (truth), kerligheit (love)).
With the national movement and its efforts to raise Faroese to the status of official language of the islands
there was also a puristic tendency which considered that it had to "weed out" undesirable foreign elements
from the language.
This work has been continued to the present time and is regarded by purists as not less important today than it
was then. The puristic activities have to a high degree been modelled on similar efforts in Icelandic and, to
some extent, in Norwegian, and have been inspired by these. Words have been taken directly from Icelandic,
or new words have been formed according to the Icelandic models (e.g. útvarp "radio"), but words have also
been designed within the country, or old and partly repressed words have been revived.
THE DIALECT NORM

The scattered settlement which is a natural consequence of the


geographic conditions has, as mentioned already, led to Faroese
being split up into a number of dialects at an early stage. This was
indeed a stumbling-block when the necessity of creating a common
standard of the written language was faced. The archaic spelling
allows the various dialect areas to keep their local pronunciation to
a large extent.
The development within population and settlement in our century,
especially after the war, with people moving from the villages to the
capital, and the consequent concentration of population in the
Torshavn area, has given this central area a strong position in
setting the standard in linguistic respects. The concentration of the
higher schools and the mass media in this region contributes to the
consolidation of this position, so that there is some tendency
towards regarding the Central Faroese pronunciation as a sort of
norm, which is often used as a normal reading pronunciation, e.g. in
the schools and on radio and television.
Today, these factors exert an obvious levelling influence on the
dialectal differences, although the dialects are in principle
considered to be equal.

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