Målbryting

The Janus Face of Norwegian Language Politics

Stian Hårstad — 2025-01-07

This paper seeks to illuminate an ideological paradox within Norwegian language policy, a duality that is rather striking but nevertheless has often gone unnoticed: From the mid-19th century and extending for at least a century thereafter, there existed a large national effort to give the Norwegian people a Norwegian language of their own. Simultaneously, another national initiative aimed to deprive certain parts of the population within the same country of their language. At the core of this paradox lies an individual deeply enmeshed in both processes – the theologian and parliamentary politician Vilhelm Andreas Wexelsen (1849–1909). The analysis predominantly revolves around Wexelsen and his work, while the historical and ideological context in which Wexelsen operated is inevitably given great weight. Not least by making Wexelsen’s emblematic motto ‘Norwegianity and Christianity’ (Norw. ‘Norskdom og kristendom’) the cornerstone for both the argumentation and the organization of the discussion.

‘Vet du ka som er en kombinasjon?’

Anette Briksdal — 2025-01-22

The research question addressed in this article is how the mothers’ dialect, the dialects of the rest of the family and in the local area, and perceptions of standard dialect influence children’s early linguistic choices. The article explores the speech patterns of three children over time and discusses the reasons behind the linguistic choices they make. Additionally, it investigates the prosodic dialect features in the children’s speech and the development of these patterns. The first participants in this project are the two girls named Sol and Snø, whose everyday interactions were recorded from ages 2;2 to 4;6. The third participant is Måne, Sol’s younger brother, whose speech was recorded from ages 1;9 to 2;9. Furthermore, the mothers of these children have contributed with observational data. As the mother of Sol and Måne, I had the opportunity to continuously collect data, while Snø’s data was gathered at three separate points with approximately a year between them. Based on this dataset, we can observe that all the children have features from their mothers’ dialect, but it varies to what degree and for how long the features are maintained. Factors as input from grandparents and older siblings, and periods of absence from kindergarten seem to influence the children’s speech. Additionally, moving to the father’s local area plays a crucial role in Snø’s language development. It is also evident that all three informants, regardless of the dialects by which they are surrounded, at different points in time orient themselves toward a form of standard dialect, perhaps experienced though roleplay and from reading aloud. In conclusion, this article explores the linguistic choices made by these children and discusses how the choices might reflect the status of the different agents of language socialization.

Multilingual practices in Norwegian-German family conversations from the perspective of conversational analysis

Kristin Børde Elstrand — 2025-02-18

This article shows how Norwegian-German adolescents negotiate the framework of participation in family conversations by combining code-switching with multimodal resources. The data consists of self-made video recordings of everyday conversations from two multilingual families (13 recordings, approx. 4 hours), recorded between December 2022 to January 2023. Both families have children of adolescent age (between 15 to 20 years) who have had their upbringing in Norway, whereas their parents moved to Norway from Germany as adults. Through detailed analyses of authentic conversations, based on Auer’s (1995) theories on code-switching, the material shows that the adolescents use code-switching, in combination with multimodal resources, to suggest changes in the participant framework within the family conversation. This often occurs when there are disagreements between the adolescents in the family interactions. The results show how codeswitching can contextualize both a participant’s preferred language and the changes that occur within the conversation’s structure at the same time. The analysis employs multimodal conversation analysis to deepen the present understanding of multilingual adolescents’ linguistic practices in family conversations, as offered by existing sociolinguistic studies. Thus, the article provides insight into how code-switching is a resource in the interaction between multilingual participants, and it shows how the term of code-switching may be a useful and important tool when studying multilingual conversations.