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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 579

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Language against the city: Promoting a rural dialect through criticism and ironic use of urban forms

Authors: Strand, Thea R.
Submitted by: Strand, Thea R. (Loyola University Chicago, United States of America)

For over 150 years, Norway has had two competing written norms, Bokmål and Nynorsk, which are legally equal but symbolically representative of urban and rural culture and values, respectively. Additionally, without any recognized spoken norm, Norwegians are officially encouraged to use their native dialects in all situations. In this sense, contemporary Norway is self-consciously, perhaps radically, heteroglot (Bakhtin 1981, Røyneland 2009). This paper sheds light on contemporary Norwegian sociolinguistic tensions by focusing on 1) criticisms leveled at the use of “urban” forms in rural Valdres, Norway, and 2) the highly selective and exaggerated use of certain urban forms as another means of policing and promoting the rural dialect.

Valdresmål, Valdres’ local spoken variety, was voted Norway’s most popular dialect on a national radio program in 2005. This reflects and has contributed to the recent revalorization of the dialect and a distinctly rural identity in Valdres. Valdresmål’s presently high status is evident in its regular use across social contexts and in its current caché among younger generations, as well as in pro-dialect ideology readily observable in metalinguistic discourse. While Valdresmål has recently been revalued, the regionally normative speech of nearby Oslo has simultaneously been devalued by many in Valdres. This is clear in dialect speakers’ active policing of urban language, as well as in their highly patterned and exaggerated uses of certain forms iconically associated with urban Oslo (Irvine & Gal 2000).

During ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in 2007-08, one normativelexical form frequently used in this way was the verb å snakke ‘to speak,’ for which the corresponding Valdresmål form is å prata. Highlighting this contrast, one Valdresmål speaker may criticize another by saying that she “snakker” ‘speaks’ if the latter’s speech is perceived as too normative. Here, the (de facto) normative form is combined with exaggerated Oslo phonology in a fleeting but critical performance of devalued urban-ness, with the clear implication that urban forms are inappropriate, false, and disloyal to the rural community. Thus, å snakke has become an efficient index of ideologies that support a rural dialect and identity over accommodation to dominant urban forms.

Combining Bakhtin’s conceptualization of “voice” (1981) and more recent approaches to linguistic “mocking” (Hill 2008, Chun 2009), this paper identifies clear patterns in the critical, ironic, and exaggerated use of urban language in rural Norway, locating these within particular local and national contexts.

References:

Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Chun, E. 2009. Speaking like Asian immigrants: Intersections of accommodation and mocking at a U.S. high school. Pragmatics 19(1): 17-38.

Hill, J. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.

Irvine, J. and S. Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Regimes of Language, ed. by Paul V. Kroskrity, pp. 35-83. Santa Fe: SAR.

Røyneland, U. 2009. Dialects in Norway: Catching up with the rest of Europe? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 196/197: 7-30.