Faroese language

Faroese belongs to the North Germanic branch of languages and is the first language of roughly 69,000 people from the Faroe Islands, with about 21,000 of them living primarily in Denmark or other countries. It is one of five tongues that come from Old West Norse, the language spoken during the Middle Ages; the others are Norwegian, Icelandic, and the now-extinct Norn and Greenlandic Norse. While Faroese and Icelandic are closely related, speakers cannot easily understand each other when talking, but their written forms look quite similar—mainly because Faroese uses a spelling system based on word origins.

Old Norse was brought to the Faroe Islands around 900 AD by Norse settlers who began arriving in 825. Many of these settlers, however, were not directly from Scandinavia but were descendants of Norse people living around the Irish Sea. Women from Norse-influenced areas like Ireland, the Norse–Gaelic Isles, Orkney, and Shetland often married Scandinavian men before moving to the Faroes and Iceland. This contact left traces of Middle Irish in both Faroese and Icelandic. Some place names in the Faroes, such as Mykines, Stóra Dímun, Lítla Dímun, and Argir, are thought to have Celtic roots. Early loanwords from Celtic include terms for buttermilk, an animal’s tail-piece, head or hair, hand or paw, bull, and outfield pasture.

Between the 9th and 15th centuries, a distinct Faroese language emerged, though it likely remained understandable to speakers of Old West Norse and was similar to the early form of Norn spoken in Orkney and Shetland. After the Danish–Norwegian Reformation in the early 1500s, Faroese stopped being written; Danish took over in administration and education. The islanders kept the language alive through ballads, folktales, and daily conversation, preserving a strong oral tradition for about 300 years without a written form.

In 1823, the Danish Bible Society published a two-language version of the Gospel of Matthew, with Faroese on one side and Danish on the other. A written standard for modern Faroese was created in 1854 by Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb and the Icelandic scholar Jón Sigurðsson. Their orthography was based on Old Norse roots, similar to Icelandic, and was designed to represent all Faroese dialects fairly. It had the benefits of being etymologically clear and keeping ties to written Icelandic, but the actual pronunciation often differs greatly from the spelling—for instance, the letter ð does not correspond to any specific sound. Another scholar, Jakob Jakobsen, proposed a phonetic spelling system, but it was never adopted by speakers.

The Gospel of John was published in Faroese in 1908 by the Scripture Gift Mission. Faroese became the official language of schools in 1937, of churches in 1938, and of the nation in 1948 under the Home Rule Act. That same year, the first complete Bible translation was finished. Until the 1980s, public radio broadcasts were mostly in Norwegian and Danish, which is why older generations often speak Norwegian alongside Danish and Faroese. Eventually, Faroese broadcasts took over, and now all radio and local newspapers use the language. Today, Danish is considered a foreign language, though about 5% of Faroe Islands residents learn it as their first language. Both Danish and English are required subjects in primary and secondary school, and English fluency is increasingly valued, especially among younger people. Films and television are often shown in English with Danish subtitles.

In 2017, the tourist board Visit Faroe Islands launched a website called Faroe Islands Translate. Users can enter text in thirteen languages, including English, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Instead of an instant machine translation, the text goes to a volunteer who provides a live video translation or a recorded one later. The project aimed to get Faroese added to Google Translate.

Old Faroese, spoken from around the mid-14th to mid-16th centuries, was a form of Old Norse used in the medieval Faroe Islands. Its key developments were diphthongisation and palatalisation. There is not enough data to establish a precise timeline for Faroese, but a rough one can be made by comparing it to Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. In the 12th or 13th centuries, á and ǫ́ merged; by the early 14th century, delabialization occurred, changing y, øy, and au. The vowels í and ý merged, as did i and y, but í and ý seem to have undergone labialisation instead, as shown by their later development. The consonants k, g, and sk were palatalised before Old Norse e, i, y, ø, and au. Before this palatalisation, é and ǽ merged, and around the same time, an epenthetic u was inserted into word-final consonant clusters. A major shift in quantity also happened in Middle Faroese, with the process of skerping taking place after delabialization but before other changes.