Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

Some Icelandic linguists seem to have modelled their ON stop
“ideal” on the Northern Icelandic dialect, rather than on Norwegian or
Swedish—or Southern Icelandic, for that matter. This can be deduced
from the tendency to view the Northern Icelandic dialect as more “original”
than the Southern dialect (Böðvarsson 1951, Árnason 1986). Unlike
Norwegian and Swedish, the Northern Icelandic dialect has “true” postaspiration
in its word-medial singleton fortis stops, although the geminates
are preaspirated. Thus, the ON orthographic representation appears
to be better matched by the phonetic “surface forms” of Northern Icelandic
than, for example, Southern Icelandic.
We now have evidence of dialects with even “purer” postaspiration
than Northern Icelandic. In the Western Åland dialect all ON fortis stops,
even the word-medial geminates, are reflected as postaspirated (cf. Ch. 4,
section 4.5.3). This is apparently also the case in the areas of Bjerkreim
and Dalane in South-western Norway (cf. Ch. 4, section 4.5.2). One
could argue that these dialects preserve the original ON pronunciation,
postaspirated fortis stops that are free of any preaspiration.
The problem with this idea is: If ON had normative postaspiration on
all stops, initial and medial, then why are such stops so rare in Scandinavia
today? In the Nordic languages, normative word-medial postaspiration
is known only in three relatively small areas. In fact, areas
with normative preaspiration outnumber the areas with normative postaspiration.
In the remainder of Scandinavia, the tendency for nonnormative
preaspiration seems much stronger than the tendency for postaspiration.
From a typological perspective, it seems counter-intuitive that
the relatively unmarked feature of postaspiration has almost entirely
given way to the very marked feature of preaspiration, even if this preaspiration
is non-normative.
While this issue, as such, has not been considered previously, objections
have still been raised, on completely different grounds, against the
portrayal of the ON stop system as contrasting postaspirated vs. voiced
stops. Chapman (1962) observed that the geographical distribution of
Sw. terräng ‘terrain,’ even though the stress is on the second syllable, the word-initial
stop is still aspirated. Likewise, in a word like metall ‘metal,’ also with the stress on
the second syllable, the stop is postaspirated even though it is not word-initial.
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