atrailofstars

Ever since I discovered and learned Esperanto, I’ve had this fascination with constructed languages, and eventually that led to a parallel fascination with natural languages (especially members of the Indo-European family). I’m especially taken with obscure or even just “fringe languages”—i.e., Catalan and the lesser-known dialects of Spanish, Kashubian, Flemish, Rumantsch, and the insular Nordic languages, Icelandic and Faroese.

It seems that, with a cursory knowledge of phonetics and at least one foreign language, you can easily learn a closely related language or dialect, and at the very least you can probably read it easily. I can read Aragonese, Galician, Portuguese, and even French and Italian simply because I’m fluent in Spanish. I can read many Germanic languages simply because I recognize word forms related to English or German, and I have at least some grasp on the phonetic differences that would result in radically different spellings and such. Now, I don’t speak Icelandic, so I don’t have easy access to the Faroese language, but I know a fairly good bit about Germanic languages, and I REALLY want to learn it.

I’m on a college student’s budget, so I can’t really afford the one really solid software program that’s been written to teach Faroese in English. I have, however, found a scattered assortment of resources all over the web, including articles regarding phonology, audio samples, dictionaries, several writing samples (heck, just check out http://fo.wikipedia.org/) even blogs and a flashcard program. I don’t expect all of these things to help me become remotely fluent in the language, but I do expect to be able to read it well by the time I’m done, and as I improve, I hope to seek out speakers of Faroese to practice with. I’m not so much bent on using the language in daily life (I’m not even sure how I would); I’m mostly just fascinated with the idea of learning an obscure language, and the sheer asset of that kind of knowledge excites me. Needless to say, I’m not expecting my attempt to learn Faroese to be taken super-seriously, but I am expecting to become adept with the language, and I consider my approach to be rather innovative, if not a hapless experiment.