A generational and social study of the changing urban dialect of Bergen, Norway

Norway is a fascinating subject of linguistic inquiry because two written standards for Norwegian (bokmål and nynorsk ) exist side by side and there is no prescriptive standard pronunciation. In this atmosphere local dialects can and do flourish. Within the distinctive dialect landscape of Norway, the urban dialect of Bergen occupies a unique position; the city is located in the heart of nynorsk country, but its residents write bokmål almost exclusively. The urban dialect long played an important role within the city's highly stratified society, allowing citizens to place an individual within that social context, and dialectal features shared and associated with the much poorer outlying districts were highly stigmatized.; In the lifetime of today's oldest Bergensers this situation has been turned on its head. A sweeping change in societal attitudes has led younger Bergensers to eschew once-preferred linguistic forms they feel are tainted by elitism and to embrace formerly stigmatized forms. A study of youth language in Bergen in the late 1970s documented some of the changes taking place in the language of young people, and this study was envisioned partly as a follow-up to that investigation. In a series of interviews with three generations of Bergensers we document this shift toward formerly stigmatized features by tracking the statistical frequency of some of the most commonly occurring forms. We examine the effects of situational variation on speech and establish the existence of a hierarchy of dialect features; a speaker's use of highly-marked dialectal forms seems to presuppose the use of other less highly-marked features. Respondents rated pre-recorded speech samples on a scale of dialectal authenticity, and samples containing various combinations of dialect features were judged to be as “Bergensk” as samples containing only the most highly marked of those forms. Younger respondents proved much more sensitive to “interference” effects, i.e. violations of the dialect hierarchy, than their elders. We also compiled and documented respondents' perceptions of and views on dialect and language use in Bergen and in the rest of Norway.