In 2005, Norway's largest national radio network held a first‐of‐its‐kind dialect popularity contest as part of its highly rated summer morning show. Listeners called in to vote for their favorite Norwegian dialect, and after eight weeks of voting and elimination rounds the rural Valdres valley was crowned national dialect champion. Winning the dialect popularity contest has contributed to a renewed sense of pride in using the distinctive local variety, particularly among young people, despite long‐term convergence toward an urban regional norm. Taking the dialect contest as a point of departure, this paper presents theoretical insights into 1) the role of mass media in the reproduction of historically contingent national language ideologies, 2) the local effects and varied uptakes of mass‐mediated ideologies, particularly along generational lines, and 3) the role of sociolinguistic aesthetics in mediating potential language‐ideological contradictions. [dialect, language ideologies, Norwegian, mass media]
In rural Valdres, Norway, the traditional regional dialect, called Valdresmål, has become an important resource for popular style and local development projects. Stigmatized through much of the twentieth century for its association with poor, rural, “backward” farmers and culture, Valdresmål has been thoroughly revalorized, with particularly high status among local youth and those involved in business and tourism. While today’s parents and grandparents attest to historical pressures to adopt normative urban linguistic forms, many in Valdres now proclaim dialect pride and have re-embraced spoken Valdresmål in various forms of public, interdialectal communication. In addition, Valdres natives also make abundant and creative use of dialect on social media, the primary locus for written Valdresmål and for emergent orthographic norms representing local speech, including strategies of maximal sociolinguistic distinction. This innovative use of written Valdresmål has been taken up by local businesses as a marketing strategy in recent years, as well, further normalizing and legitimating nonstandard forms. In the ongoing revalorization of traditional Valdresmål, it is also, inevitably, transformed—linguistically, socially, and ideologically—as it enters and circulates within new and innovative cultural domains: while widespread written Valdresmål challenges the normal sociolinguistic order, in such a process the dialect is also refunctionalized and, perhaps, increasingly standardized.
This study examines variation in the schwar realization for an area of rural Louisiana where local French varieties previously dominated and some bilingualism persists. A generational GoldVarb analysis of African American, white, and Houma (Native American) men's speech reveals significant variation in r-ful, r-less, and diphthongal realizations by ethnoracial identity, age, and education. Apparent-time change suggests long-term, contact-influenced accommodation in which younger generations of African American men with Creole French ancestry increasingly use the dominant nondiphthongal and r-ful variants. In addition, effects of accommodation to dominant regional patterns found in the South today are observed in increasing levels of r-fulness across ethnoracial groups.
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