Skärpning i den estlandssvenska dialekten på Stora Rågö

Abstract

Until the end of the Second World War, Swedish dialects were spoken on the northwestern coast of Estonia. There, on the small island of Stora Rågö, the dialect had a phonetic feature in which -ggv- or -gg(j)- appeared between two vowels: e.g. troggver ‘think’, äggja ‘the island’. The results of this study show that these stop insertions are almost identical in form to the sound law known as Verschärfung, appearing in Old Norse and Gothic, as well as in modern Faroese. Comparisons between the Stora Rågö dialect and Faroese, in particular, show that the Stora Rågö insertions also seem to appear in a similar phonetic context as the Faroese equivalents. It is therefore argued that the stop insertions in the dialect of Stora Rågö is a fourth case of Germanic Verschärfung.