Academic literature on the topic 'Dómkirkjan í Reykjavík (Reykjavík, Iceland)'

The Reykjavík Grammar School (1846–1904) has been widely regarded as a primary force in the implementation of standard language norms in Iceland. The present article attempts to test this hypothesis in a selection of 189 student essays from the grammar school, including a survey of the teachers’ corrections. Three linguistic variables were selected, both known from the prescriptivist tradition and corrected in the es-says: 1) the generic pronoun maður, 2) the finite verb in third (V3) rather than second position (V2), 3) the definite article sá vs. hinn. Based on a series of statistical tools, a log-likelihood test for the generic pronoun, generalised linear mixed-effects models and conditional random forests for verb placement and the definite article, it is argued that the use of non-standard variants correlates significantly with progression of study (grades 1–3 vs. 4–6) and/or graduation score (low vs. high). The small corpus size prevented an analysis along the lines of Hinrichs et al. (2015), who recommend testing whether the (non-)use of one stigmatised ariant also correlates with the (non-)use of other stigmatised variants. Here, the educative variables arguably fulfil a similar function, independently from observing frequency decrease over time. The results thus suggest that prescriptive efforts were, indeed, quite successful.

For years Iceland had been one of the most prosperous countries in the world, even scoring number one in the United Nations Development Report in the year 2007. In the fall of 2008 the Icelandic population faced great changes to the national economy; the country was on the verge of national bankruptcy.