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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1006

Part of Session 181: Folk linguistics and society (Other abstracts in this session)

‘Good language’ and ‘proper dialect’ in North-west Norway

Authors: Bugge, Edit
Submitted by: Bugge, Edit (University of Bergen, Norway)

Norwegian Folk discussions on language and dialect often reflect an interest in dialect authenticity. In an attempt to draft a Folk model of good language, this paper discusses the delimitation and assigned value of authentic dialect and authentic dialect use in a material from a village in a material from a village in North-West Norway.
In a Nordic context Norway is sometimes displayed as a country with a high popular tolerance of linguistic variation in both spoken and written language – especially with regards to inter-individual geolectal variation. In his Folk linguistic study in Agder in Norway, Rune Røsstad finds that while Preston and Niedzielski conclude that “Nonlinguists use prescription (at nearly every linguistic level) in description”  (Niedzielski og Preston 2000: 18), Røsstads Norwegian informants, with a few exceptions, “do not comment on normative or prescriptive aspects at all”(Røsstad 2009:109).
My paper presents data material from an ongoing PhD-project on dialect variation and socialization in seven families in a village in North-West Norway. The data material also contains interviews with 14 12-year old school pupils, who were asked to tell about language rearing at home. The study finds that though the informants are cautious of referring to linguistic correctness, their linguistic tolerance does not necessarily extend to all aspects of Norwegian speech variation. In particular, it does not always include an acceptance of all intra-individual speech variation.
When discussing language rearing in their own families, the informants seem to relate to an idealized local dialect as well as an idealized non-local norm. As Norway does not have an official spoken standard language, the delimitation of the non-local norm is somewhat blurred, sometimes reflecting an idealized urban dialect, of the nearest town, other times a non-official national spoken standard, and sometimes even an assumed international norm. However, the applications of the local or non-local linguistic norms seem to depend on folk etymological knowledge of individual ‘words’’ original form. A failure to produce ‘loanwords’ in a correct non-local way is ridiculed, just as much as a failure to use local pronunciation on assumed ‘inherited words’ is ridiculed. Thus the data may indicate a local Folk model of language in which dialects are not necessarily viewed as systems, but as a collection of linguistic units, and particularly ‘words’. In this model, appropriate speech is heavily dependent on a Folk concept of authenticity, in which the appropriate form of each single ‘word’ depends on either the assumed linguistic origin of the speaker (of which dialect is she an authentic speaker?) or the assumed origin of the ‘word’ (to which dialect does this word actually ‘belong’?).