A "High-Intimacy" Language in the Atlantic: Radio and Purism in the Faroe Islands.

This article explains the importance of the Faroese language and the ways in which it is spoken to a Faroese identity. It emphasizes the role and the significance of the radio as well as the policies of linguistic purism, which have been much discussed on air, to build and sustain this identity. A so-called high-intimacy language and public radio make for an obvious ethnographic juxtaposition. The shaping of affective experience through radio sound is heightened if the voice is known, and if the speech and language of the voice index a matrix of values shared by a small, interrelated group. Playing off this sense of familiarity which is embraced in the Faroe Islands (a rather isolated community between Iceland and Scotland governed according to Self-Rule), language has been the tool for the cultivation of a Faroese identity at a time when the Faroes' relationship to Denmark has looked increasingly uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]