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Modern Faroese spelling did not emerge from centuries of literary tradition, but was re-created mainly in the 19th century. Its founding documents consist of four spells written in a relatively orthophone spelling. Prior to their publication in 1864, these were converted into a spelling with orthographic depth along diachronic lines.

Die faroische Gegenwartsorthographie ging nicht wie die moderne Rechtschreibung vieler Sprachen aus einer jahrhundertelangen Schrifttradition hervor, sondern wurde im Wesentlichen im 19. Jh. neu erschaffen. Ihre Grundungsdokumente bestehen aus vier faroischen Zauberspruchen, die in einer bis Mitte des 19. Jh. ublichen, relativ orthophonen Schreibweise gefasst sind. Als die Zauberspruche 1846 veroffentlicht werden sollten, wurden sie schrittweise in eine stark historisierende Schreibweise uberfuhrt, die in der faroischen Gegenwartsorthographie resultiert hat. Diese Orthographie ist bemerkenswert, weil mit ihr synchron gesehen ein sehr groer Abstand zwischen Graphemik und Phonemik sprachplanerisch erfolgreich eingefuhrt werden konnte, obwohl gerade solche Verhaltnisse ansonsten vielfach als reformbedurftig gelten. Das vorliegende Buch enthalt eine Edition aller relevanten Handschriften und ordnet diese in ihren kulturhistorischen Kontext ein. Unlike the modern orthography of many other languages, Modern Faroese spelling did not emerge from centuries of literary tradition, but was re-created mainly in the 19th century. Its founding documents consist of four Faroese spells written in a relatively orthophone spelling that was common up until the middle of the 19th century. Prior to their publication in 1864, the spells were converted step by step into a spelling with orthographic depth along diachronic lines which eventually resulted in Modern Faroese spelling. This spelling is remarkable, since it represents the successful normative implementation of an orthographic system which, seen from a synchronic point of view, maintains a vast gap between graphemes and phonemes, a state of affairs that in most cases would be a reason for, not a result of spelling reforms. The present book contains an edition of all relevant manuscripts, and situates them in their cultural and historical context.

Grammaticalization as standardly conceived is a change whereby an item develops from a lexical to a grammatical or functional meaning, or from being less to more grammatical. In this article we show that this can only be part of the story; for a full account we need to understand the syntactic structures into which grammaticalizing elements fit and how they too develop. To achieve this end we consider in detail the history of definiteness marking within the noun phrase in North Germanic, and in particular in Faroese. We show how this change requires us to distinguish between projecting and nonprojecting categories, and how a category can emerge over time and only subsequently develop into a head with its own associated functional projection. The necessary structure, rather than being intrinsic to an aprioristic universal grammar, grows over time as part of the grammaticalization process. We suggest that this in turn argues for a parallel correspondence theory of grammar such as the one adopted here, LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR, in which different dimensions of linguistic structure can change at different rates.

While all of the Scandinavian languages have verb-second order in main clauses, they vary in the word order in subordinate clauses: in Icelandic the finite verb appears in a high position, to the left of negation and sentence-medial adverbs, while in all of the standard Mainland Scandinavian languages it remains in a low position, to the right of these elements. This order in Mainland Scandinavian is known to be the result of a historical change, and has frequently been tied to the loss of agreement morphology. Faroese has been argued to be currently undergoing a change of the same type, but it has proved difficult to establish a sound empirical footing for the various claims about the syntax of this language. In this article we present data from three experimental investigations of acceptability, supplemented with a study of available texts, that show that the language is very close to completing the change in the loss of the high position for the verb, but that its syntax is still distinct in this respect from that of Danish, the mainland Scandinavian language with which it is in most contact. In addition to establishing a firmer empirical basis for theories of verb movement, our study also makes the methodological point that grammaticality-judgment tasks can yield extremely fine-grained results even in cases where variability is at issue.

Drawing on novel data collected from 216 speakers (108 speakers of Icelandic and Faroese, respectively), we provide a micro comparative examination of the distribution and interpretation of double object (DO) and prepositional (PP) ditransitives in Insular Scandinavian. Overall, PPs are more acceptable in both Icelandic and Faroese than has been previously reported, with a substantial amount of variation in Icelandic. Even though verbal semantics interacts with PPs more so in Icelandic than in Faroese, different verbs in the same semantic class pattern differently in both languages, complexifying claims that have been made about the semantic restrictions on PPs (Þráinsson, Höskuldur. Syntax of Icelandic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007 and Þráinsson, Höskuldur et al. Faroese: An Overview and Reference Grammar. Føroya Frόðskaparfelag, Tόrshavn, 2004). Furthermore, our findings suggest that ditransitive verbs in Insular Scandinavian do not entail successful transfer of possession, irrespective of verb class. This is counter to claims that have been made for English, for which ‘give’-type verbs are argued to entail successful transfer (e.g., Rappaport Hovav and Levin in J Linguist 44(1):129–167, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226707004975; Beavers in J Semant 28(1):1–54, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffq014; Bruening in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 39:1023–1085, 2021).

Norwegian, like Swedish and Faroese, exhibits double definiteness: modified definite phrases normally contain both a prenominal determiner and a suffixed definite article on the noun. However, exceptions—phrases with only the determiner or only the suffixed article—can be found. This article investigates adjectives which do not need to be preceded by the prenominal determiner in Norwegian. Corpus data and acceptability judgments are used to describe these exceptions and to propose a syntactic analysis. The study shows that there are three types of adjectives in Norwegian: regular ones that require double definiteness, exceptional adjectives that allow determiner omission, and quantifier adjectives that never occur with a determiner. I argue that phrases with exceptional adjectives can be accounted for by the same movement that is proposed for determiner-less phrases in Icelandic and Northern Swedish (Julien 2002, 2005). Finally, the article presents a brief exploration of the patterns of variation in omission versus presence of the determiner, including historical and dialectal variation.

This article analyses labour market experiences of migrants of non-Nordic origin who have settled in the Faroe Islands, a small North Atlantic archipelago with a population of about 51,000 people. By examining the experiences of educated migrant workers who are employed in three different blue-collar workplaces: a cleaning company and two fish-processing plants, evidence is drawn from a cross-disciplinary study on language and migration in the Faroe Islands. This study explores the experiences of migrants in acquiring, using and becoming “new speakers” of Faroese and the challenges they face regarding labour market access and participation. In this article, framed within an ethnography of language policy, we highlight the institutional language policies which may be shaping migrants’ experiences, and how migrants enact their own language policy decisions and practices on the ground. We focus in particular on internal communication and language management in the three blue-collar worksites, comprising views and voices of both employers and employees, on the language policies and practices observed in these workplaces, and on workers’ views on language learning opportunities in blue-collar workplaces. Added to this, attention is drawn to implications of limited language learning opportunities in blue-collar jobs (which become the main barrier to accessing skilled jobs), to underutilisation of professional skills, and to long term implications of present macro- and micro-level language policies and practices affecting lived realities of workers of migrant origin.

Research has shown the importance of vocabulary development in relation to other parts of language development, e.g. grammar and reading development. Cross-linguistic research has shown similar as well as dissimilar tendencies regarding content in different languages. This study examines, for the first time, the characteristics of Faroese children’s early productive vocabulary utilizing a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). The study participants were 415 children aged 8 to 20 months. The results provide information on the composition and characteristics of lexical development in Faroese children and demonstrate that nouns are dominant among first words, as are onomatopoetic words and words describing family relationships. Faroese children are comparable to children learning other languages with respect to rate of acquisition and composition of words, with a somewhat higher share of words describing family members as stable words in the emerging language.