Pulmonic Ingressive Speech in Icelandic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29173/scancan262Keywords:
ingressive speech, Icelandic, linguisitics, women's speechAbstract
Pulmonic ingressive speech – utterances spoken on the in-breath – is a common feature of many languages including Icelandic. This paper presents findings from a survey-based study on the use of ingressive speech in Icelandic. The research was conducted in Iceland and Icelandic-speaking communities in North America. The study confirms our first hypothesis—that ingressive speech in Icelandic is used primarily by women. Our second hypothesis – that it is on the wane – was confirmed by the North American respondents, but results from Iceland were mixed. Our third hypothesis – that ingressive speech is non-existent in North American Icelandic was not confirmed. The article concludes with a comparison of our findings with scholarship on ingressive speech in the North Atlantic/Baltic Zone.
References
Clarke, Sandra, and Gunnel Melchers. 2005. “Ingressive particles across borders: Gender and discourse parallels across the North Atlantic.” In Dialects across borders: 11th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI), Joensuu, August 2002. Edited by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjatta Palander, and Esa Penttilä, 51–72. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Coates, Jennifer. 1989. “Gossip revisited: Language in all-female groups.” In Women in their speech communities. Edited by Jennifer Coates and Deborah Tannen, 94–121. London: Longman.
Eklund, Robert. 2008. “Pulmonic ingressive phonation: diachronic and synchronic characteristics, distribution and function in animal and human sound production and in human speech.” Journal of the International Phonetics Association 38, no. 3: 225-324.
Gao, Man and Peter Sundkvist. 2015. “Pulmonic Ingressive Speech in Orkney Dialect.” Scottish Language 34: 1-13.
Hakulinen, Auli, Tine Larsen, and Jakob Steensig. 2022. “Indexing that something is sufficient: Interactional functions of ingressive particles in Finnish and Danish.” Nordic Journal of Linguistics 45, no. 1: 99-125.
Hakulinen, Auli. 1993. “Inandningen som kulturellt interaktionsfenomen.” In Språk och social kontext. Edited by Ann-Marie Ivars, Hanna Lehti-Eklund, Pirkko Lilius, Anne-Marie London, and Helena Solstrand-Pipping. 49–67. Helsingfors: Helsingfors universitet, Institutionen för nordiska språk och nordisk litteratur.
Kobayashi, Nazuki. 2001. “Ingressivt “Ja”: Ja på innpust – ikke tegn på overraskelse eller dårlig hjerte.” MA diss., Bergen University.
Peters, Francis J. 1981. “The Paralinguistic Sympathetic Ingressive Affirmative in English and the Scandinavian Languages.” PhD diss., New York University.
Pitschmann, Louis A. 1987. “The Linguistic Use of Ingressive Air Stream in German and the Scandinavian Languages.” General Linguistics 27, no. 3: 153-161.
Stølen, Marianne. 1994. “Gender-related use of the ingressive Ja in informal conversation among native speakers of Danish.” In Cultural performances The Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, University of California, Berkeley. Edited by Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, Laurel A. Sutton, and Caitlin Hines, 668–677. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
———. 1995. “Multi-functional ja: An analysis of the Danish affirmative ingressive ja as conversation structuring device in informal conversations.” Nordlyd: Tromsø University Working Papers on Language and Linguistics 23: 217–229.
Sundkvist, Peter. 2012. “Pulmonic Ingressive Speech in the Shetland Isles: Some Observations on a Potential Nordic Relic Feature.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 11, no. 3: 188-202. doi:10.35360/njes.270.
Thom, Eleanor Josette. 2005. “The Gaelic gasp and its North Atlantic cousins: A study of ingressive pulmonic speech in Scotland.” MA diss., University College London.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Emily Beyer, Prof. Kirsten Wolf
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
