Adventures in Language: The Wacky World of Norwegian Dialects

I've been learning Norwegian for a couple years now. To recap, I took a few basic courses before I moved, but nothing my first year in Norway. Instead I learned a lot (and still do) by listening and speaking as much as possible. But as a student here I'm allowed to take Norwegian for Foreigners classes at the university without any extra fee, so in June I took a placement exam and this semester I am taking level 3 (out of 4).

The class has been pretty fun and a good balance to my master thesis work. We write a lot and I'm learning way more grammar than ever before. And my teacher says I don't speak with an American accent, which is a huge compliment. Not completely true, but still very nice to hear. With a passing grade in this class I am allowed to take university courses in Norwegian, should I ever want to. It's also a fairly nationally recognized stamp of approval, more or less saying "You can speak Norwegian." So that's nice!

I just finished the big assignment for my class, a 5-page paper with references written in Norwegian. We could write about basically whatever we wanted as long as the topic was somewhat academic. I chose to write about Norwegian dialects because they fascinate me. There's a lot of dialects here, and they can be very different from each other. That can be really frustrating for some people, but I find dialects really fun to listen to and try to figure out. When you first learn Norwegian as a Foreigner you learn the written language, bokmål, and you learn to speak like bokmål. The problem is, and this can be a pain at first, is that almost no Norwegians speak like bokmål. Instead, there are what seems like a million dialects that are used by everyday people in everyday life. 

I felt like this post needed some pictures, 

so I'm including a few from this fall even though

they have nothing to do with anything...

Norwegian dialects developed way back when in small remote areas, at the end of fjords or down in the valleys, where there was little contact with those outside the area. That's why they can be so different from each other. Every dialect falls into one of the main dialect groups, and a given dialect is probably similar to what’s spoken in nearby places, but it almost certainly has some special characteristics in terms of intonation, pronunciation, and/or vocabulary. And of course the dialects are more alike than not, but how many ways do you suppose there are to say the word “I” in Norwegian? Five? Maybe ten? I submit to you that there are no less than 12. It's ridiculous, but also pretty cool. Here they are: jeg, je, eg, jæ, jæi, e, æ, æg, æi, æig, i, and ig.

Do you know how many people live in Norway today? About five million. Think about that for a second. Five million people and 12 different ways to say "I." I didn't know it was possible to have that much variety in such a small country. As you can imagine, sometimes Norwegians have to change the way the speak (a little or a lot) so they can be more easily understood by others. I have friends in Trondheim who speak very differently here than they do at home because the differences are that big.

What gets me is when Norwegians from different places can't understand each other at all. Some dialects are so different, so unique, that they can hardly be called the same language. The language situation here is so different than in the US. Even though the US is much bigger, I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone speaking American English that I can't understand.

Because there is so much variation and dialects represent distinct places, dialects mean a lot to people. You can tell where someone is from by the way the speak, sometimes down to which side of town they grew up on. So it makes sense that people can be pretty proud of their dialect because it separates them from others. Others might be embarrassed about their dialect and not want to associate with the place it comes from. As you can imagine, Norwegians from different areas like to poke fun at each other, and everyone (even me) has their own opinion about which dialect is the prettiest/hardest/ugliest/etc.

You might be wondering, is it hard to understand and keep up with different dialects? My answer is mostly no, but a little bit yes. Most dialects I'm exposed to just take a little getting used to and then I understand what people were saying. But other dialects are more difficult and take more concentration, and you would need to live in a place for a while before you really got everything. I still speak basically like bokmål, even though I'm surrounded by lots of different dialects. But it’s fun to learn new words in specific dialect that you can use when you are in a certain place. I think it means a lot to people for them to be able to speak like they normally would, so as much as possible I make an effort to understand each new dialect and person I come into contact with.

For me, Norwegian is both easy and hard. Lots of Norwegians and foreigners think it's difficult to learn but I pick most of it up fairly quickly. Probably because I'm highly motivated and maybe because it's in my genes? At the same time there are always challenges. Dialects are one, grammar is another. But learning is fun, and as long as dialects are around I will have a lot to learn, and Norwegians will always have something to talk about.