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Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Kurt Braunmüller
Research assistant: Dr. Hjalmar P. Petersen
Student assistants: Tine Stensbjerg (until 2007); Minja Rudolf, Jana
Wittkugel, Helena Hansen, N.N.
Co-operation partners:
This research project is the first to be concerned with multilingualism on the Faroese Islands, which belong to Denmark. It was started in 2005 and is currently promoted in the second and last phase.
The object of our research is primarily the use of bilingual (spontaneous) oral language by the Faroese inhabitants. This is being analysed by means of samples from 60 test subjects, now coming from three generations, as opposed to the two generations investigated in the first promotion phase of the project. A sample analysis of written language development on the Faroese Islands is an additional aspect being taken up in the second promotion phase.As
before, morphosyntactical aspects of the Faroese-Danish multilingualism will be
the main focus of the research project.
Research question
The question: “What kind of bilingualism is the Faroese bilingualism?” already served as the starting point for the first application. The possibilities considered were:
(a) a balanced bilingualism
(b) a – historically based – diglossal-functional distributed multilingualism
(c) Danish as a foreign language in addition to Faroese as the mother tongue.
The results of the first promotion phase have shown without doubt that possibility (b) does not apply (anymore) and that (c) does not apply, either. Until now, all data and the results of their analysis point towards hypothesis (a).The 18 islands in the Northern Atlantic that form the Faroese Islands have been part of the collective Danish state area
since 1380. Faroese was established as the school language in 1937 and also became
the language of the church one year later.
Faroese has been the national language since 1948, when the Faroese Islands were conceded self-government. A thorough teaching of
Danish is required in schools, however. Danish was the only written and oral
language used in all important public domains such as school, administration
and in the military until the 1950s.
In this final phase of the research project, the primary research questions will remain “What kind of bilingualism is the bilingualism on the Faroese Islands?” and “How is this shown in individual speech in three generations?” The following will be completed in the second promotion phase:
(a) Analysis of the language use by the middle generation
(b) Examination of the development of written language use
in Faroese and Danish by means of samples consisting of different kinds of
texts from several periods in the 20th century
(c) Quantitative longitudinal analysis of all (oral) data concerning the number of code switchings and the assorted types of transfer and convergence
To achieve these aims, interviews will again be
performed, now with a total of 20 test subjects from the middle generation. The
interviews will be carried out in the same way they were realized in the first
promotion phase with the young and the old generation: as partially structured conversations
in an informal setting, lasting about an hour. The topics covered will be
situations in day to day life, the current situation on the Faroese Islands, international politics, education and work. The
first interviews will be carried out in Faroese by a native speaker, with the
test subjects being interviewed for a second time a couple of months later in
Danish, also by a native speaker.
