Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1262

Part of Session 157: Dialect Perceptions in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Dialect Perceptions in Oslo – Delineating the Linguistic community?

Authors: Stjernholm, Karine
Submitted by: Stjernholm, Karine (University of Oslo, Norway)

This talk will present the major findings from the author’s PhD project where changes in the Oslo dialect the past 40 years have been examined. The main challenge of the project has been to define the physical and linguistic boarders of the study.

A large linguistic project conducted in Oslo 40 years ago (the TAUS project) showed great variation in the Oslo dialect. The variation was connected to several social variables, but geography turned out to be the most pertinent factor for variation. This geographically-based dialectological method was well suited to describe linguistic communities 40 years ago when dialect was mainly dependent on locality, and by defining a geographic area, a linguistic area was defined as well.

Today, the situation is different, and the connection between geography and dialect in Oslo do not seem to be as strong as before. In today’s linguistic landscape the social and linguistic situation is complex and earlier speech varieties seem to converge (Opsahl and Røyneland 2009).

In an attempt to map the linguistic variation of today, we conducted an online survey on the web site of an Oslo-based newspaper during 2010. In the survey, respondents were asked to give their perceptions about several variants of the Oslo dialect. One aim of the survey was to investigate how city dwellers in Oslo placed themselves in the linguistic landscape of the city, and hopefully these perceptions would contribute to delineate speech communities in the city based on the idea that speech communities can be defined by participation in a shared set of norms (see e.g. Hudson 1980, 27). Another aim was to find out if these perceptions can be connected to the language changes the past 40 years (see e.g. Preston 1989, 2).

Approximately 100 000 people from throughout Norway answered the survey in a few weeks, an interest for the survey that indirectly shows that the situation for the Oslo dialect is complex on a national level as well.

The talk will mainly focus on the results from the online survey and see how reported perceptions can contribute to delineate one or several speech communities in Oslo, and thereafter these perceptions will be aligned with production data from a speech corpus from Oslo (The NoTa corpus). At last I will propose that perceptions of physical places in the city may play a pertinent ideological role for linguistic variation today, that the sense of a place can be a significant variable in speech variation in the sociocultural complex places that cities are. Speech variation is among other factors dependent on connections to the ideology of physical places or districts in cities and the sociocultural connotations inherent in these, without this factor necessarily being concomitant with place of origin or where one lives.

References:

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

Preston, D. R. 1989. Perceptual dialectology: Non-linguists’ view of aerial linguistics.

Dordrecht. Foris.

Opsahl, T. and U. Røyneland. 2009. ”Oslo-ungdom – født på solsiden eller i skyggen av

standardtalemålet?” Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 1/2009, 95-120.

TAUS: http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/taus/english.html

NoTa: http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/oslo/english.html

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Dialect Perceptions in Oslo – Delineating the Linguistic community?