The Phonology of Icelandic and Faroese

Kristján Árnason

Agu 2011 · Oxford University Press

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This book presents a comprehensive, contrastive account of the phonological structures and characteristics of Icelandic and Faroese. It is written for Nordic linguists and theoretical phonologists interested in what the languages reveal about phonological structure and phonological change and the relation between morphology, phonology, and phonetics. The book is divided into five parts. In the first Professor Árnason provides the theoretical and historical context of his investigation. Icelandic and Faroese originate from the West-Scandinavian or Norse spoken in Norway, Iceland and part of the Scottish Isles at the end of the Viking Age. The modern spoken languages are barely intelligible to each other and, despite many common phonological characteristics, exhibit differences that raise questions about their historical and structural relation and about phonological change more generally. Separate parts are devoted to synchronic analysis of the sounds of the languages, their phonological oppositions, syllabic structure and phonotactics, lexical morphophonemics, rhythmic structure, intonation and postlexical variation. The book draws on the author's and others' published work and presents the results of original research in Faroese and Icelandic phonology.

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Kristján Árnason is the author of several major works on Icelandic language, including a two-volume work on Icelandic linguistics, published in 1980 and a handbook of Icelandic phonology, published in 2005. His publications in English include Quantity in Historical Phonology: Icelandic and Related Cases (CUP 1980), The Rhythm of Dróttkvaett and other Old Icelandic Metres (University of Iceland 1991), as well as articles in journals such as Journal of Linguistics, Nordic Journal Linguistics, Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Lingua.