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This paper argues that the conversational style of adolescents in multiethnic areas in Oslo is characterized by an extended degree of epistemic focus and expressions pointing explicitly towards the news value of utterances. The linguistic traits contributing to this notion is a set of discourse markers where wallah, or as it is often referred to in Norwegian; wolla (orig. Arab. ‘I swear by Allah’), seems to be prominent, together with Norwegian counterparts such as sverg, jeg sverger and helt ærlig (‘swear’, ‘I swear’ and ‘quite honestly’). Equipped with methodological insights from Interactional linguistics, the distribution and discourse functions of the markers are analysed in a corpus of conversations between adolescents growing up in multiethnic areas (the Upus/Oslo-corpus) and compared to another larger, representative corpus of modern Oslo dialect (the NoTa/Oslo-corpus). The discourse markers in question are also discussed in light of grammaticalization processes.

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In this paper we examine the role of Hip Hop and rap lyrics in the reevaluation and legitimisation of a new mulitethnolectal speech style developed in multiethnic and multilingual environments in Oslo, Norway. This speech style, commonly refered to as "Kebab-Norwegian", has been met with negative attitudes not only from the establishment but also in mainstream media. However, attitudes seem to be changing, partly due to the efforts of rappers from immigrant backgrounds who promote themselves as users and propagators of the new speech style. They take a clear stance against the prevalent idea that "Kebab-Norwegian" poses a threat to the Norwegian language. In our paper we present on-going research on some of the most recent high school textbooks where lyrics from these performers have been included, and we also consider the strategies of promotion employed by some of the publishing houses.