However, despite the trouble that laymen put themselves to, their lexical creations are often not accepted by the language community. This could also happen to an official lexicographical institution, though in this case there may well be a tendency to feel that a dictionary produced by trained academics carries an aura of infallibility, although this will depend on the J general esteem accorded academics in the society concerned. In the case of the North Frisian dictionary for which a university department was especiallyl created in 1950, the informants are very reluctant to question the lemmata, 1 even though in some instances they may be contrary to their native-speaker intuition. Admittedly most of the words listed are the result of field work, or have been culled from books written over the past three centuries, but many . words are included which must have been attempts by earlier lexicographers to modernize their language and which in all probability were never fully accepted by the language community. However, a word which can be .1 proved to have been recorded a long time ago tends to be rather uncritically regarded as correct, although this in no way means that the word will then be J used.
- In many countries, institutions have been set up to standardize and J modernize a language, such as the Icelandic Language Commission founded in 1964. This institution tries to modernize Icelandic by reviving old Icelandic -~. words which appeared in the sagas rather than accepting loan words. They ( have two five-minute broadcasts a week on the radio and have succeeded in -1 making the population take an interest in their language. Examples of revived words with a new semantic content are: simi (telephone) which is the old word for "wire" or "thread", pjalfa (to train) which meant "to work hard". A lot of new creations are composita using tw9 Icelandic words, such as ftug-maOur (pilot) coming from flug (flight) and matiur (person, or gervi- tung/ (satellite) coming from gervi (artificial) and tungl (moon) (Jonsson, 1979). Such a policy is possible in such a small and compact community as 1 Iceland, especially as the language here is an integral part of the Icelander's 1 • identity. In other communities a better policy might, according to Wilts ( 1983), be to observe the forms created by the speakers themselves rather .J than try to impose forms upon them.