Målbryting is a peer-reviewed Open Access journal owned by SONE (Sociolinguistic Network in Norway) which is a group of scholars working on the intersection between language and society.
Understandings, negotiations and emotions of multilingualism in first grade
This article examines how a group of first-grade students respond to a week-long teaching intervention that incorporates multilingualism, grounded in Linguistically Appropriate Practice (LAP) (Chumak-Horbatsch, 2019). The intervention focused on integrating students’ home languages into classroom activities. Drawing on classroom observations, conversations and student work, we analyse three students’ responses to instructional activities such as language portraits, discussions about language and the use of students’ first languages in teaching. The analysis builds on Brigitta Busch’s (2022) principles of biographical, social and visual approaches to examine students’ understandings, negotiations and emotions related to their own and others’ multilingualism. The findings show that students construct their language repertoires primarily on the basis of identification rather than competence, that they associate languages with national or ethnic background and that visualisations support their meaning-making about language and multilingualism. Furthermore, we find that students engage in negotiations with each other about language and language identity and that linguistic and social power relations are central to these negotiations. With regard to emotions, the students display both positive emotions – such as engagement and sense of mastery – and negative emotions related to the rejection of language identity. The findings emphasise the need for an inclusive language pedagogy in schools, a practice that is grounded in and strengthens a biographical understanding of language repertoires in which reflexive visualisation is employed as a pedagogical method.
Copyright (c) 2026 Eline Øien Haagensen, Irmelin Kjelaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Åse Mette Johansen, Eivind Nessa Torgersen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Present participles without and with -s in The Nordic Dialect Corpus
The article describes the use of present participles without and with -s (as in ståane and ståanes) in the Norwegian part of The Nordic Dialect Corpus. The corpus consists of conversations between and interviews with young and older informants of both genders from 111 different locations. The study of the geographical distribution in the corpus shows that the central area of present participles without -s is Western Norway, but that such forms are also more or less common in Eastern Norway and the Trøndelag area, while participles with -s have their central area in Northern Norway, and in addition are quite common in the southwestern part of Eastern Norway and the Agder area. Dialect descriptions go a long way towards supporting this, but they additionally indicate that s-forms may be or have been little more common than in the studied corpus. Furthermore, the study shows that there is variation in the material from many locations between present participles without and with -s. It is difficult to prove clear intraindividual variation, but there are obvious examples of variation caused by influence from another oral or written variety. In addition, in the corpus considered as a whole, there is a tendency that young people use more participles with -s than older people, as well as a tendency that participles with -s are least common in attributive and adverbial use and most common when the participle functions as a subjective or objective predicative.
Copyright (c) 2025 Endre Mørck https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sociolinguistic research based on spoken language data usually involves creating a written record of the audio material. This process involves making a number of choices that in themselves may have sociolinguistic consequences, in addition to touching upon issues of theory of science when dealing with data. This issue is explored in an examination of 20 sociolinguistic master’s theses in the field of Nordic/Norwegian studies. The selected sample studies have been submitted at Norwegian universities in the period 2014–2024 and have been analysed with particular attention to two issues: How do the students account for their tran­scription strategies in terms of methodological deliberation, and how do they proceed in terms of actual transcription practice? The findings from the qualitative analysis of the material are discussed and problematized in light of key principles of research ethics and sociolinguistic research and theory related to the indexica­lity of written language and language ideologies. Based on this, we argue that there is a need for increased awareness and reflection on transcription as an essential part of the research process. Choices regarding transcription have conse­quences for the scientific quality of the research, but they are also funda­mentally constitutive of reality; as reflections of theoretical assumptions and authoritative language ideologies, they can also contribute to (re)producing marginalized identity positions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rikke van Ommeren, Stian Hårstad https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Address forms and anaphoric pronouns in historical plays in the early 20th century
Theatre language has had a central place in descriptions of Norwegian public spoken language in the 19th century. For example, Knud Knudsen’s work with the stage language in a theatre in former Christiania has been highlighted as an example of the linguistic interest of the 1850s. The changes in theatre language were an important contribution to the Norwegianization of the colloquial language in the Ausbau process from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century. In this article, the question is asked how certain linguistic features were used by playwrights and directors in the middle of this period to give the audience an experience of the language in the 16th and 18th centuries, respectively. As a historical linguistic study, it is primarily an investigation of the linguistic awareness of the theatre workers in a linguistically turbulent time, but they also had to take into account the audience’s familiarity with both older and newer forms in order to use them as artistic devices. The analysis sheds light, not only on the perceived distance between the 16th and the 21st century, but also on the distance between the 20th and the 21st century. In addition to the historical linguistic aspect, the article contributes to the understanding of linguistic variation and linguistic choices as a tool in theatre productions within a realistic tradition.
Copyright (c) 2025 Agnete Nesse https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The kindergarten’s cloakroom as a dynamic multilingual place
The study examines how children, parents and staff in a kindergarten create a social space in the kindergarten’s cloakroom through (linguistic) actions and language choices. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, which includes participant observation, documentation of the kindergarten’s semiotic landscape, field conversations and interviews with staff, the study shows how the cloakroom becomes a site for multilingual practices, while the kindergarten otherwise is dominated by a Norwegian language norm. The study demonstrates how children and adults take ownership of this space and create a multilingual environment through their actions. The analysis is grounded in Lefebvre’s theory of the produc­tion of social space – through spatial practice, representations of space and lived space – Gadamer’s perspectives on play and Pascual-de-Sans’ concept of idiotopy. The findings reveal that language choices and the construction of the cloakroom as a social space are influenced by complex processes related to place, time and agency. When the cloakroom is less in focus for the staff, it can become an important site for children’s play, where they negotiate both linguistic norms and other rules. The study argues for the significance of such social spaces as part of the kindergarten’s linguistic environment, where children can take ownership and make language choices that deviate from established majority language norms. At the same time, the study highlights the importance of time in research on language and place, both theoretically and methodologically, as well as the roles of researchers in gaining access to such spaces through invitations from the children.
Copyright (c) 2025 Florian Hiss, Anja Maria Pesch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The article discusses the role of young Norwegians in the influence of English on the Norwegian language. It is commonly assumed that young Norwegians use a more English-influenced variety than older generations, and that they are at the forefront of the anglicization of Norwegian. However, an interesting question is whether the use of English among youth represents the beginning of language change, or whether it is rather a life-stage phenomenon tied to adolescence and early adulthood. I argue that young age plays a relatively minor role, and that the extent of anglicized language use is more closely linked to lifestyle factors and language attitudes commonly found among young people. Furthermore, I suggest that whether anglicisms are abandoned with age or retained and contribute to long-term changes in Norwegian partly depends on the type of anglicism. Anglicisms with a foreign form (typically loanwords) are assumed to be more conscious forms that are easy to avoid using, while anglicisms with a domestic form (typically calques) are assumed to be less conscious and therefore harder to discard during the transition to a new life-stage. The article draws on recent linguistic data from social media platforms – a type of material that has so far received little attention in the Norwegian context. In this way, the article also highlights the potential role of social media in language change, and how today’s media landscape may facilitate increased use of English.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anne Mette Sunde https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Janus Face of Norwegian Language Politics
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.
Copyright (c) 2024 Stian Hårstad, Brit Mæhlum https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Multilingual practices in Norwegian-German family conversations from the perspective of conversational analysis
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.
Copyright (c) 2024 Kristin Børde Elstrand https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Through official language policy Norwegian schools have been given an important role in the process of language revitalization and language reclamation of Sámi languages in Norway. The topic of this article is Sámi language education policy and the school as a space for students to learn Sámi outside the administrative area for Sámi language when students have little access to Sámi language in the family and local community. To explore this topic, I examine the experiences of one student whom I call Sunniva, and her process of choosing and un-choosing Sámi at school. Sunniva studied North Sámi for six years, and in the analysis, I investigate what made studying Sámi desirable and possible, and later also difficult. The research question is what social and historical discourses that revolve in Sunniva’s decision to start learning Sámi and later quitting Sámi as a school subject. The data collection and analysis is situated within the frame of nexus analysis, and additional central theoretical perspectives are investment and affect. The analysis shows that despite Sunniva’s willingness to invest in studying Sámi, issues surrounding the Sámi subject create negative experiences, and she eventually decides to quit learning Sámi at school. It is the organizational issues that create affective reactions, and these issues show how the Sámi subject within a Norwegian school is influenced by the politics of Norwegianization.
Copyright (c) 2023 Hilde Sollid https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Critical literacy and multilingual competence are increasingly relevant for citizens in digitised and globalised societies and have also been given more emphasis in the latest Norwegian national curriculum. Critical literacy can be understood as the competences students need to be able to negotiate within a complex and text-based society, while multilingualism from a school perspective concerns making room for and using each individual student’s linguistic resources and identity as a tool for learning. This article examines how secondary school students relate to multilingual texts and investigates the potential of song lyrics as an arena for developing critical literacy using fictional texts. The article draws on theories of critical literacy and translanguaging, with a dataset consisting of interviews with six tenth-grade students from a school with large cultural and socio-economic differences in the Oslo area. The students were asked to select two texts among four suggestions to be used in an imaginary eighth-grade Norwegian language arts classroom and to evaluate the texts’ appropriateness. The analyses show that the students have a close connection with a range of languages and linguistic phenomena based on their cultural backgrounds. We also find that the students had extensive knowledge about song lyrics as popular culture, but that their ability to take a critical approach to the lyrics’ content is variable. Multilingual song lyrics have a potential as a training ground for critical literacy, while also being a text type that allows students to display their knowledge of language and culture, making them ideal as bridging tools in language arts classrooms.
Copyright (c) 2023 Celine Simers, Joke Dewilde, Tove Stjern Frønes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anette Briksdal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Elevers språkbruk: Hvordan forbedre relasjoner i klasserommet
The pronoun ‘hen’ – practical and political
In 2022 a gender-neutral singular pronoun hen was introduced through a spelling reform of Norwegian Nynorsk and Bokmål (origin: from Finnish trad. hän via Swedish hen, officially introduced into Swedish in 2015). In this article, we present findings from a survey on hen sent to all employees at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences during the public hearing period prior to the spelling reform. The analysis shows a majority of the respondents (N=645) supporting the introduction of hen, across age groups (range 20–70), but with some differences according to gender and department affiliation. The reported use of hen was also high. In a quantitative content analysis of free text comments, we see that two categories of arguments dominate among respondents supporting the introduction of hen: The first is a ‘political’ subcategory with comments emphasizing the rights of persons who do not define themselves as female or male. The second is a ‘pragmatic’ subcategory where hen is referred to as a practical alternative to other gender-neutralizing Norwegian expressions, but in which respondents do not necessarily presuppose an understanding of gender beyond the binary. The arguments against hen follow a similar divide. In a dominant ‘pragmatic’ subcategory, respondents express that the new pronoun is an unnecessary addition to the current range of gender-neutral expressions, and in a ‘political’ subcategory respondents express negative value assessments of the reform and pronoun. The article documents patterns in reported language use and reported attitudes about a particular language change at a particular point in time, from a particular social group (HE employees), and the results provide a starting point for future investigations of the usage pattern and attitudes to the pronoun hen in Norwegian.
Copyright (c) 2023 Edit Bugge, Trude Bukve, Hege Myklebust https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A crucial component of the cultural import that accompanied the immigration of so-called “Jews of the East” (Ger. “Ostjuden”) to Norway in the latter half of the 19th century was the language used by the majority of this group, what we today know as Yiddish. There is much evidence, however, that both the language and the glottonym were relatively vague terms for most Norwegians well into the 20th century, and the article attempts to map how “the language of the Jews” was referred to in this national minority’s early phase. This gives us insights into which sociolinguistic conceptualisations arose when facing a linguistic phenomenon that most people considered unfamiliar. A wide range of written sources, primarily mass media texts such as newspapers, magazines, and periodicals, have been scrutinized with particular attention to the terms used for “Jewish language” in a Norwegian context. This review paints a picture of a protracted process of Language Making, where an uncontested glottonym took decades to establish. One reason for this appears to be the fact that this linguistic practice’s status as a language has persistently been called into question. The data also reveals that the dawdling consolidation of Yiddish in Norway is connected with tendencies in the contemporaneous international discussion of Jewish language and culture.
Copyright (c) 2022 Stian Hårstad https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Georg Wenker’s Linguistic Atlas of the German Empire is a classic dialect-ological project from the late 19th century, in which data was collected from (almost) all school districts throughout what was then Germany. The data is still used in German dialect research, and all questionnaires have in recent years been published digitally. Less well known is that the material not only contains questionnaires representing German dialects, but also data representing the minority languages spoken within the then German borders. Among these are also Danish, i.e. South Jutlandic, data from a total of 287 school districts in the former Duchy of Schleswig, today divided between Denmark and Germany. Traditionally, the Danish dataset has not been considered particularly interesting by Danish dialectologists, mainly because it was thought to be tainted with methodological artefacts, consisting as it does of written translations from Standard German into the dialects. Deviations from the expected Danish grammar have thus often been explained with priming effects in the translation process. However, recent research has shown that the data can nevertheless be used for studies of authentic language contact phenomena, i.e. German-influenced features in South Jutlandic dialects. The present article discusses the South Jutlandic data from a contact linguistic perspective. This entails both a methodological discuss¬ion and four short case studies of selected grammatical features. The studies show, firstly, that the data should be considered a valuable documentary resource that is well-suited for contact linguistic analyses. Secondly, they demonstrate that German-influenced grammatical features, to a certain extent, have to be considered authentic and firmly established in nineteenth-century South Jutlandic.
Copyright (c) 2023 Steffen Höder https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“I have never used Norwegian Nynorsk before”
Teachers who teach in primary schools in Norway are required to master both Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk, the two varieties of written Norwegian. Several studies have shown that the teacher education institutions do not ensure this competence, and that the teacher students entering the profession have a low level of competence in Norwegian Nynorsk. This study examines the attitudes of teachers in further education towards Norwegian Nynorsk and the connections between attitudes and the teachers’ professional background, their written language background, and their written language practices. The basis of the study is an online survey where primary school teachers taking part in an online in-service course in Norwegian were the respondents. The article contributes insights into the attitudes that some teachers have towards Nynorsk in education, and into possible connections between the self-reported attitudes and the use of Norwegian Nynorsk in teaching. The teachers who participated in the survey attach different value to Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål, and these positions are expressed when the teachers practice their profession. A main finding is that the teachers in the survey have varying degrees of competence, and thus mastery, of Norwegian Nynorsk and Bokmål, and this is expressed when they practice their profession. There is also a tendency for respondents who have a background in primary school teacher education to be somewhat more positive about Norwegian Nynorsk than those who have a background from the other educational groups represented in the survey.
Copyright (c) 2023 Britt Iren Nordeide https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Student evaluations on English and local language(s) at five Nordic Universities
This article discusses how students experience and evaluate the language practices they meet during the course of their university education. The study focuses on the students’ experiences and assessments of the use and mastery of English and the local language(s) in their education. Firstly, I describe language policies at higher education institutions in the Nordic countries, where parallel language use is a preferred strategy. I then present a thematic analysis of students’ comments, collected through a survey distributed to students at five universities in three of the Nordic countries. Whereas students value the use of both English and the local language(s), they ask for more attention directed at how the different languages should be managed throughout the course of their education. The student comments show that it can be challenging to succeed with parallel language use. Some of the difficulties students face are connected to their own challenges with understanding and using other languages than their first language, while others thematise lecturers’ lack of language competence. These challenges are discussed in light of Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice. Lastly, I argue that language policies should to a greater extent include acquisition planning, in addition to status planning.
Copyright (c) 2021 Trude Bukve https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
During the 2010s, a series of changes were introduced in Norwegian legislation and case law, in which the assessments of spoken language competence are used as legal evidence or documentation in the questions of immigrants' rights to asylum, residence and citizenship in Norway. This paper highlights two such examples: Language analysis in connection with application for protection, which is used to assess the origin of asylum seekers, and the introduction of language requirements for permanent residence and citizenship, where immigrants living permanently in Norway are now required to document oral language skills at a certain level in order to obtain a number of legal and democratic rights. The article provides an overview of the criticisms of these two examples from various fields of linguistics and applied linguistics and shows how the examples have been criticized, both in academic literature and public debate, of reflecting decision-makers' outdated views about linguistic variation and change, language acquisition and belonging, and outdated views about the relation between language, nation, ethnicity and geographical space.
Copyright (c) 2021 Edit Bugge https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Gendered language and language use then and now
This article, which is based on a keynote lecture with the same title given at the SONE conference in 2019, provides an overview of language and gender research in Norway, as it builds on feminism and general sociolinguistic research. In many ways Norwegian research reflects international research and to a large extent Anglo-American research. It is therefore necessary to refer to and discuss a good deal of international research, in particular American research, as an important backdrop for Norwegian scholarly work in this area.
Copyright (c) 2021 Tove Bull https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Flerspråklighet – til begeistring og besvær
Copyright (c) 2021 Randi Neteland https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Blikk for språk: Sosiokulturelle perspektiver på norsk språkvirkelighet
Copyright (c) 2021 Ragni Vik Johnsen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2019 Åse Mette Johansen; Eivind Nessa Torgersen
“Those who need extra effort and who have not progressed”
This article presents four Norwegian language teachers’ perceptions of multi­lingualism in school. Linguistic diversity is emphasized in the new curriculum for the 10-year compulsory school in Norway (Kunnskapsløftet 2020), which makes it both important and interesting to investigate teachers, and especially language teachers, beliefs about multilingualism. The data consist of qualitative in-depth interviews, which are analyzed and discussed in light of theories about multilingualism and language ideology. The analysis demonstrates that the teachers have a narrow definition of multilingualism and multilingual students. Several associate multilingual students with students who have a different first language than Norwegian, who come from another country, who have low school progression and who lack Norwegian language skills. When it comes to the teachers’ didactic reflections about multilingualism in the classroom, the teachers are oriented towards Norwegian and the development of Norwegian language competence, and it is primarily cultural, not linguistic diversity that is highlighted as a resource in education. Based on these findings, we discuss how the teachers’ constructions of multilingualism and multilingual students reflect dominating language ideologies. We argue that a monolingual ideology (Blommaert 2009), a one-nation-one-language ideology (Blackledge & Creese 2010), purism (Ommeren 2017) and nativespeakerism (Ortega 2019) seem to work together in the teachers’ reflections and conceptions of multilingualism. A possible consequence of this may be that minority language students are held up against monolingual standards and end up failing because their competence in Norwegian will never reach the level that is expected.
Copyright (c) 2020 Irmelin Kjelaas, Andrea Hjertås Olaussen
Copyright (c) 2020 Åse Mette Johansen; Eivind Nessa Torgersen
Standardized online language in protest or respect?
This article presents an analysis of 1,949 online discussion entries from "Nordnorsk debatt", the Facebook page on which the regional newspaper Nordlys launches online debates. All discussion entries investigated are from the 2017 election campaign. A key finding in the study is that online language in political discussions about Sami politics is notably more normative than discussions about other political topics. In the material as a whole, 54 per cent of the statements have at least one orthographic deviation. In such cases, the comment or the response on Facebook differs from the two Norwegian written standards (Bokmål and Nynorsk) by shortening the words or by using punctuation or letters in an unconventional way. By that we can say that the norm in political online language expands the official standards of written Norwegian. However, this predominance of orthographic deviations does not appear to have been created by language users who do not master the standard, and the deviations therefore hardly represent a linguistic decline. Nor do orality markers that amplify the prosody or show temper dominate in the material. There is therefore no reason to say that such orthographic deviations are iconic or that the confrontational style is the essence of political CMC. The article provides two alternative explanations of the significantly lower amount of orthographic deviations in digital statements about Sami politics. The first, and consensus-oriented explanation, is that the language users choose a neutral written standard out of respect of this controversial case. The second, and more conflict-oriented, explanation is that these language acts index that one wants to be loyal to or favours the Norwegian culture and language over the Sami. If this is the case, the debaters consciously or unconsciously use linguistic variation to strengthen the majority culture’s linguistic hegemony. In the article I argue for the conflict-oriented explanation, also because men are strongly overrepresented in these debates. Towards the end of the article, I compare the CMC in debates about Sami politics and immigration policy.
Prosjektet Talemålsendring i Noreg (TEIN) – form og innhald
Hvornår er en kode ikke længere den samme kode – og hvem afgør det?