Linguistic researchers from two universities in Germany returned to Gimli last week to continue their investigation into the varieties of Icelandic spoken in Manitoba, how English and Icelandic influence each other and other phenomena.
Co-principal researchers Nicole Dehe from the University of Konstanz and Christiane Ulbrich from the University of Cologne – along with their PhD student Meike Rommel from the University of Konstanz – had visited towns in the Interlake (Gimli, Riverton and Arborg) and Winnipeg last December to gather samples of Icelandic spoken in Canada.
Express Photos by Patricia Barrett
This time around they were gathering samples of English spoken by North Americans who’ve not had any Icelandic language influence. The English-speaking samples will serve as a control group or a benchmark for the Icelandic groups being studied.
“What we are interested in is the varieties of Icelandic spoken in Canada and in Iceland and the ways in which the languages are acquired in different contexts, and also the contact phenomena between the two languages: how does English influence Icelandic and how does the Icelandic spoken here influence the English spoken here,” said Dehe, during a presentation last Friday in the Lady of the Lake Theatre in the Waterfront Centre. “This is an important question to ask because there’s research that shows that influence is mutual between the languages even though English is the dominant language.”
The researchers are studying four speaker groups – North American Icelandic, modern Icelandic (i.e., speakers in Iceland), Icelandic as a second language and North American English – to help answer their hypotheses.
They’re focusing on two linguistic phenomena: pre-aspiration, which is an expulsion of air when pronouncing certain words, and word stress, which emphasizes certain syllables of a word.
Icelandic speakers, for example, will expel air when saying “pot-ahh” (a kitchen pot). And they’ll place a stress on the first syllable of certain words such as professor, emphasizing the “pro.” For some words like coffee and Africa, there is no discernible stress difference between English and Icelandic. The researchers want to know whether unique linguistic features are maintained by Icelandic speakers, as well as compare different speaker populations, including those living in Iceland.
“We have many groups because the comparison of different speaker populations makes a [big] contribution to our understanding of language. Language changes over the lifespan and there are various influencing factors, such as age, language use and language contact – these are the features we are most interested in,” said Ulbrich. “We have you, the heritage speakers [a minority language learned at home as children who grow up with a dominant language], monolingual speakers of North American English with no influence of Icelandic, and second-language learners, people who learn Icelandic without any background.”
This reporter (as a North American English speaker) took part in the study, which has all participants look at a few hundred illustrations of objects and name them, as well as look at illustrations of multiple objects and make up a story based on those objects. The answers are recorded.
It was relatively straightforward to name objects such as a coat, a table, a banana, etc., despite a lapse in recall when presented with a jellyfish (let’s hope that’s down to exhaustion after 220 pictures, not dementia). Naming simplistic compound words – two illustrations with a plus sign between them – such as an arm and a chair (armchair) posed few problems, but some illustrations were perplexing. For instance, a person’s back, plus another person’s back with some squiggly lines on it elicited a response of “back shingles” rather than “back tattoo” because this illustration seemed eerily similar to that TV commercial for the shingles vaccine, showing the virus erupting across a victim’s back.
Storytelling from multiple illustrations was more challenging, and it was good to have Ulbrich taking part (the study allows a researcher to participate in this exercise) to keep me from going off-piste and wasting time trying to marshal characters and loose plotlines into a coherent story.
In one exercise, for instance, we started off with an illustration of what surely must be a Norman castle because it had a squarish stone keep. Then we see two kings who’ve laid down their bagpipes in anticipation of a good feast that features various cuts of meat and intestines – Ulbrich suggests sausages after I say intestines – and French bread, which is illustrated by a French flag and a loaf of bread. I feel confident up to this point, because French plus Norman plus Scotland is an historical plausibility. And haggis is, after all, boiled up in intestines.
But here’s where the plot thickens. Out comes an illustration of a theatre ticket for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Are the two kings going to watch this play or are they part of Shakespeare’s so-called play within a play, taking the roles, as it were, of Hamlet’s slain father and evil uncle Claudius? Then shadow puppets put in an appearance. Why? To stand in as a symbol for the soul or, as Ulbrich suggests, as entertainment for children? Am I overthinking this?
And who is that girl with the plaid skirt lying on the stage whispering to a cat while a man either sings or shouts? Is that Ophelia? It might very well be because her position could symbolize death. But I don’t recall her owning a cat. Maybe this is Scottish symbolism, I say, thinking of the Clan of the Cats with their wildcat heraldry and confederate clan members’ squabbles. But wait a minute, Hamlet is not Shakespeare’s Scottish play – Macbeth is. Hamlet is Danish. And why does a fire-breathing dragon later appear in conjunction with Tinker Bell from Peter Pan? I say the dragon must be a metaphor for Hamlet’s psychological torment, thinking this is his “to be or not to be” moment in which he must decide to either take up arms against a sea of troubles (i.e., his dragon) or slink away stage left. But how to explain the fairy? There was a ghost in Hamlet, I say. Ulbrich concurs, naming A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the play with the fairies. There’s a lot more I can’t explain such as children who get only water and an apple at a wedding reception when I can clearly see there’s a Bundt cake in the room. Why can’t they eat cake? Are these children illegitimate?
It’s a good thing Dehe, Ulbrich and Rommel are interested only in how we English speakers employ word stress and pre-aspiration rather than our storyboard abilities.
And so far, they’ve got 24,860 words from the picture-naming task (113 participants x 220 pictures) and 2,260 words from the storytelling task (113 participants x 5 stories x 4 words) to analyze.
Each word which will have to be manually labelled in software and produced as a spectrogram and oscillogram. The researchers have students and other assistants helping prepare the data, and their analysis will be prepared and published after that is completed.
“It’s going to take us quite a while, but there’s a PhD dissertation and papers [published in scholarly journals] coming out of this and you will be informed,” said Ulbrich.
In these very early stages, she added, the impression they’ve got as far as word stress goes is that North American word stress is not “pushing the Icelandic out.”
Dehe and Ulbrich (Rommel was in Riverton carrying out research) took questions from Icelandic-speaking participants who were recorded last December. Some asked whether the researchers found a difference in accent between Gimli, Riverton and Arborg speakers.
Dehe said that will be hard to detect until they compare the languages, but it’s possible as that occurs a lot with intonation.
But even if there are Interlake regional variations, Ulbrich said they don’t expect pre-aspiration and word stress patterns to differ.
To make generalizations from the data, the researchers need a lot of speakers. They’ll be recording more North American English speakers at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
The researchers thanked the participants who signed up for the study and those who helped organize it, including Elva Simundsson and Julianna Roberts in Gimli, Star Johnson in Arborg, Halli Jonasson in Riverton and Katrin Nielsdottir in Winnipeg.
