Language, Overseas Research and a Stack of Problems in the Faroe Islands

Abstract

Overseas research exposes the researcher to geographies which are new but can be deceptively familiar. A study in the Faroe Islands resulted in an initial interpretation of landscape history which subsequent examination showed to be flawed. Difficulties were generated by a combination of working across several languages (including local dialect) and the problems arising from enquiry and explanation concerning unusual landscape features. This paper explores the steps involved in achieving an understanding of a particular humanly-altered landscape and reflects upon the dangers inherent in taking a more superficial approach to such a task.

Key Words:

• Foreign languages
• overseas research
• landscape interpretation
• peat
• Faroe Islands

Acknowledgements

Kevin J. Edwards would like to thank The Leverhulme Trust for funding his research in the Faroe Islands.

Notes

¹ Thus, the prescriptive ‘we should ban monolingualism in geography’ (Garcia-Ramon, 2003, p. 3) would have effectively prevented this Faroes-based research from taking place; the current paper will hopefully be seen as an example of ‘engaging with regional scholarship’ (Robinson, 2003, pp. 279–280; Jazeel, 2007, p. 293); while, in drawing upon Sigvardsen's (2006) compilation, and hopefully building upon it (Edwards et al., 2008), we have arguably avoided the pitfalls of placing Faroese in ‘secondary relation’ to English (Gregson et al., 2003, p. 16).

² It might reasonably be asked why KJE was undertaking research in an area without a knowledge of the language? Faroese is spoken by nearly 49,000 people in the Faroe Islands themselves, with perhaps another 10,000–20,000 in Denmark and elsewhere. It is closest linguistically to Icelandic or west Norwegian, the former of which, at least, is spoken by relatively few people. Even a reading knowledge of Danish – the usual second language of the Faroes – does not make the reading of Faroese a straightforward task. KJE's primary research is in the areas of palaeoecology and environmental archaeology for which most of the literature is in English, and this certainly applies to the extremely limited writing on these topics for the Faroe Islands. Palaeoecological fieldwork is not usually reliant on language skills for its enactment and where local communication was required and where contacts did not speak English, then this could generally be conducted satisfactorily with the aid of others who were less linguistically challenged. The alternative to this is perhaps not to work in such areas, but then research into such fascinating landscapes may never be performed. Albeit rewarding, the effort of learning Faroese would be a major undertaking and the time might be thought better invested in other activities (but see Veeck, 2001). The research reported here clearly needed to be informed by ethnography and written sources, but if it was to be undertaken at all at this time, then events dictated that the work was likely to be led by the first author.

³ Such multiple step translation chains are cited by Twyman et al. (1999), Gade, (2001) and Watson (2004). KJE first experienced this in Greenland where it was necessary to make travel arrangements with a farmer at Qassiarsuk. Neither the farmer nor members of his immediate family spoke English or much Danish, but he telephoned (cf. Fraser, 2007) a niece who had spent a school year in Canada and she was able to act as intermediary in a Greenlandic-English conversation.

⁴ It might be observed that pressures on academics from the likes of the RAE (the cyclical UK Research Assessment Exercise; RAE 2008) its successor (REF, 2009), research funding bodies or employing institutions, may discourage the thoroughness and demands arising from overseas fieldwork where additional linguistic expertise may be required, if not overseas fieldwork itself.