In addition, women from Norse Ireland, Orkney, or Shetland often married native Scandinavian men before settling in the Faroe Islands and Iceland.
Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb and the Icelandic grammarian and politician Jón Sigurðsson published a written standard for Modern Faroese in 1854, which still exists.
Faroese broadcasts quickly replaced earlier programs and now all radio content is transmitted in the language, alongside all local newspapers.
Text can be entered in thirteen languages, including English, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Further, the language underwent a palatalisation of k, g and sk before Old Norse e, i, y, ø, au > /kʲ, ɡʲ, skʲ/ > /cᶜ̧, ɟᶨ, ɕcᶜ̧/ > /tʃʰ, tʃ, ʃ/.
Before the palatalisation é and ǽ merged as /ɛː/ and approximately in the same period epenthetic u is inserted into word-final /Cr/ and /CrC/ clusters.
[22] The study of Faroese dialectology began hundreds of years ago, with the scholar Lucas Debes noting a north–south distinction as early as 1673.
In the 18th century linguist Jens Christian Svabo made further distinctions, such as identifying the Tórshavn dialect, though his categorization lacked thorough justification.
In 1891 Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb would write a more definitive study of the language's variation, noting distinguishing characteristics of the north–south divide such as the northern aspiration of unvoiced plosives after long vowels and the pronunciation of ⟨ó⟩ as /œ/ in most of the north compared to /ɔ/ in the south.
[21] The southern variety of Faroese is very distinct, possibly due to geographic distance exacerbated by the lack of underwater tunnels which have connected most other islands north of Sandur.
The dialect of these islands is characterized by a unique form of certain personal pronouns, alongside phonological features such as the intervocalic voicing of non-geminate stops.
The central dialect area centered around Suðurstreymoy features a merging of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ in unstressed ending syllables.
The island of Nólsoy is a notable transitional area due to its unique realization of long ⟨ó⟩ as [au:] and short ⟨ó⟩ as [ɔ] compared to the [ɔu:] and [œ] found in Tórshavn and elsewhere.
Faroese shares with Icelandic and Danish the feature of maintaining a contrast between stops based exclusively on aspiration, not voicing.
Faroese is an inflected language with three grammatical genders and four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.