(Varianz in der Mehrsprachigkeit auf den Färöern) Carried out at the University of Hamburg 2005-2011.

Hjalmar P. Petersen worked as a research assistant and was in charge of the corpus, data, data collection, building the database and managing student  assistants. The database has been completed and contains spoken language data from three generations (young, middle-aged, older) from different dialect areas of the Faroes.

Hjalmar comments on the project:

We studied bilingualism in the Faroes starting in November 2005 and concluding in 2011. We focused on the spontaneous oral language of the Faroese. The informants belonged to three generations (young, middle-aged and older). We also sampled written language, for example, from Danish essays written by Faroese students at an upper secondary school.

Research topic: We focused on morphosyntactic characteristics of Faroese and Faroese-Danish.

Purpose: We studied what type of bilingualism is found in the Faroese and how it manifests in the three generations’ language usage. We undertook a quantitative longitudinal analysis of all the data collected and studied code-switching, transfer of idioms from Danish to Faroese and convergence.

Method: In order to reach our stated objectives, we made recordings. The interviews were semi-structured conversations lasting about an hour. The topics discussed were: daily life, the current situation in the Faroes, international politics, school and work. Our informants spoke Faroese and later also Faroese-Danish. Faroese interviewers made the first set of recordings, Danes or Danish-speaking Germans subsequently made the Faroese-Danish recordings. We also used questionnaires from the ScanDiaSyn project. We have material from six areas in the Faroes and three generations.