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

and Lappic (Finno-Ugric). It has been suggested that through the influence
of Old Norse, preaspiration spread to Celtic (Borgstrøm 1974)
and Lappic languages (Posti 1954), but also that it may have spread from
Celtic to Old Norse (Naert 1969). These views will be discussed briefly
in Chapter 5 (see also overview of these hypotheses in Hansson
1997:189ff). As for the Nordic languages, the areas under consideration
are Iceland, the Faroes, Jæren (Norway), Gudbrandsdalen (Norway),
Härjedalen (Sweden), Gräsö (Sweden), the Åland archipelago and the
Åboland archipelago (Finland).
The bulk of the dialectal descriptions referred to in this chapter were
written in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Most of the dialectologists
working on Swedish and Norwegian during this prolific era of
Scandinavian dialectal research used the Swedish Phonetic Alphabet
(Landsmålsalfabet) notation, or its Norwegian equivalent Norsk lydskrift,
for their transcriptions (cf. Lundell 1879 and Storm 1908 1 , respectively,
for overviews of the Swedish and Norwegian systems). Generally, these
transcription systems are now considered overly elaborate and cumbersome,
especially The Swedish Phonetic Alphabet, which contains a large
number of possible symbols, many of which are difficult to make sense
of at first glance.
Still, the number of symbols used for the average dialect is usually
fairly small. When describing the pronunciation for a given dialect, the
dialectologist would establish a sound inventory for the dialect. These inventories
were systematic and reductive but not phonemic (i.e., not based
on the distinctive function of speech sounds), and therefore contained a
considerable degree of allophony. Thus, each word was represented by a
(non-phonemic) canonical form of sorts, but the transcriptions came
much closer to the sound values actually produced than would a phonemic
representation.
In the following discussion, I have translated all examples referred to
in these works into the current IPA notation as closely as possible. In
some cases, prosodic information, especially about the placement of
stress and tone type (i.e., grave vs. acute), has been omitted. English
glosses are provided, but note that these sometimes involve some guess-
1 The first half of Storm’s overview was originally published in 1884.
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