THE FAROESE LANGUAGE

When you travel to the Faroe Islands you can easily get by with English, that is widely spoken especially by the younger generations. But the national language of the roughly 43,000 inhabitants of the 18 islands situated in the heart of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway is Farose. The Faroe Islands' own language has been recognized for the last hundred and fifty years and is one of the five remaining Nordic languages, the others being Icelandic and Norwegian, closest related to Faroese, and Swedish and Danish.

However the Faroese language differs considerably from the other Nordic languages in the phonological system. Although some words in Icelandic and Faroese are very similar, they are pronounced quite differently. The same is the true with Norwegian, Swedish and Danish words quite similar to Faroese and meaning the same. The pronunciation differs so much that the oral language is not easily understood by the others.

Although the five Nordic languages derive from the same source, Old Norse, they have developed in different directions. New words and forms have been coined in Faroese that do not exist elsewhere, words have changed their meaning and new special local forms have been added.
Generally speakers of the East Nordic languages Danish, Swedish, and mostly also Norwegian are able to understand each other's languages and to read the written forms without too much difficulty. However the West Nordic languages, Icelandic and Faroese are in a category by themselves. And although similar, these two languages are not mutually easily comprehensible either.

The grammar and syntax of Norwegian, Danish and Swedish on the one hand and Icelandic and Faroese are very different. In the two latter there are forms that have disappeared from the East Nordic languages a long time ago. Faroese has three genders, four cases and other features that even some Faroe Islanders have problems using correctly, many of them using Danish syntax in Faroese.

Despite this the Faroese language has developed and expanded over the last century, and particularly in the latter half of the 20th century when it became the language of instruction in schools. In the 1960s the publication of textbooks in all subjects gained momentum. Faroese radio broadcasting started in 1957, television in 1983 and apart from newspapers and several periodicals there have been around 200 books published in Faroese annually.

Scandinavian Press, Issue 4, 2001