Hjalmar P. Petersen Knihy

There are two official languages on the Faroe Islands, Faroese and Danish; Faroese is the dominant language and Danish the first second language that children acquire. The question addressed in this book is what the exact transmission processes in this asymmetrical bilingual setting are. By combining van Coetsem's notions of Recipient Language Agentivity and Source Language Agentivity with parts of Myers-Scotton's and Jake's frameworks, the author succeeds in explaining the language setting on the islands.

This monograph is the first of its kind to deal specifically with gender assignment in a North Germanic language. When discussing the morphological rules, it is shown that there is a difference between noun inflection in Faroese and gender assignment in that a noun has, in addition to class membership, eight independent gender markers, and the division between controller genders and target genders plus the different rules, morphological and semantic, shows how gender is an ordering principle requiring agreement, and that it thus divides the Mental Lexicon into classes which governs agreement.