Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1238

Part of Session 177: Field methods in multicultural megacities (Other abstracts in this session)

Online surveys in multi-ethnic Oslo – New methodological approaches

Authors: Stjernholm, Karine; Ims, Ingunn Indrebø
Submitted by: Stjernholm, Karine (University of Oslo, Norway)

This talk will present methodological considerations related to the use of internet for linguistic surveys. During a few weeks in the 2010 our survey Oslo-testen (The Oslo test) got 100.000 responses from respondents all over Norway. The test was developed in collaboration with one of Norway’s largest newspapers, Aftenposten, who published the survey on their web sites. The aim of the survey was to gather perceptions about linguistic variation in speech varieties in Norway’s capital Oslo from inhabitants of the city.

The past 50 years Oslo has become a multicultural city, and 28% (170 200) (Statistics Norway/ssb.no January 31. 2012) of the population are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. This ethnic diversity is naturally followed by a linguistic diversity, and linguistic changes as a result of the mixture of ethnicities, cultures and languages. The survey presented a wide range of linguistic variables for the respondents to evaluate – both traditional dialect features and also features related to influence from recent immigrant languages, leading to a overwhelming quantitative material to process. In addition, the respondents were asked to leave information about social background and their perceptions about linguistic variation in open comment boxes, especially perceptions about categorization connected to multiethnic features, features commonly used among adolescents in Oslo’s eastern parts (Opsahl and Røyneland 2009, Quist and Svendsen 2010). This information resulted in a wide range of qualitative data there are some obvious difficulties in interpreting.

The overwhelming amount of responses revealed the enormous potential that internet provides in gathering large quantities of data. This approach enables researchers to map linguistic variation in a large and complex speech community. On the basis of the idea that a speech community can be defined by participation in a shared set of norms (Hudson 1980, 27), it is not unlikely that speakers’ own categorizations and perceptions of social differentiation can be useful when trying to delineate a speech community.

This approach gives the opportunity to gather information about categorizations that are widespread in the speech community, but new to the researcher, and can reveal that traditional social categorizations not necessarily coincides with the categorizations of the language users. In this way a large scale data collection like this can be used as a pilot study for more qualitative studies as well, or as a basis for more sociological or ethnographic approaches, where new categorizations can be investigated further.

References:

Chambers, J.K. og P. Trudgill. 1998 [1980]. Dialectology. Second Edition. Cambridge. Cambridge.

Hudson, R.A. 1980. Sociolinguistics. Cambridge UP. Cambridge.

Opsahl, T. and U. Røyneland. 2009. ”Oslo-ungdom – født på solsiden eller i skyggen av standardtalemålet?” Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 1/2009, 95-120

Quist, P. and B. A. Svendsen eds. 2010. Multilingual Urban Scandinavia. New Linguistic Practices. Bristol, Multilingual Matters.

Statistics Norway: http://www.ssb.no/innvandring/

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Online surveys in multi-ethnic Oslo – New methodological approaches