Socioiinguistic Patterns in Bergen

Socioiinguistic patterns in Bergen HELGE SANDØY Abstract 77* j%T%pM*(**Km<akdect a dWecf Abzfdbas 6act fo (Ae Afk&Be ^g«. W deve/opaf sevewf dkzmcf Gngwiak cAoracfankfks, and jWif&W aocW warMMff Acre a6o gvoke^ TAeMow^ "^^ prejgnk gyideMfe # am-a&wMéMMi! AomogøKiryproceif amoMgjwumgffopk Kxby. me/fud- db frasrigioK, mzrKOi&& g%4$ig%9%cam( sac d#raw%f are aba bake*. wffA OMf Æxcqm&m. g%n (Ae (ma%iAMaf gfyt &A^ « wmuAkg. rafAfr fAan wdaf gro&pf. a/eaf»rg fAaf k aZ$o fMyAajizga' im a» mwr^a- tion of self-reported speech. 1. History and peculiarities The dialect of Bergen is the only Norwegan urban dialect that evidently must have come into existence and got its characterisdcs dunng the Middle Ages. Many of its Hngmsdc peculiarities can be accounted for only by tracing them back to that early language st^e and to ^mixtiire of nationalities that existed when Bergen was a marketplace for tradesmen from many countries. For a long period it was an important Hanseatic town. In about 1300 its population was between 5,000 and 10,000 (Helk 1982: 492), which was enough both to constitute a language society on its own and to keep its linguistic independence in spite of a continuous flow of people moving from the rural neighboring districts. The population of Medieval Bergen had a large foreign element As earjy as the fourteenth century there might have been two to three thousand foreigners, who made up a considerable proportion of the total population. In this melting pot Germans represented the strongest foreign component (Helle 1982 472E). 0165-2516/9S/01LS-4W7 A«V. JL&*. 1»* '# f W&. ff. «KW* €> Walter de Gruyter These data are not only facts hidden m historical dissertations. The Bergeners have created a strong consciousness about their "international" characteristics, and their diakct has formed an important demonstration of the special Bergen identity. In 1737 the great Bergen author Ludvig Holberg comments on this in his description of Bergen. Today the Bergencrs' genuine commitment to their dialect is demonstrated in frequent articles and serious discussions in the newspapers on the semantics and origin of dialect words. Some of the linguistic features of Bergen differ from what we encounter in all other Norwegian dialects and can most easily be explained as a result of an influence from foreigners who had Norwegian as a second language. Such phenomena are the many morphological simplifica- tions — above all, the reduction from three to two genders, unknown in other Norwegian dialects — and the reduction of Vowels in inflectional suffixes from three into one. In addition, some characteristics seem to originate from or be influenced by traits of Norwegian dialects far away from Bergen, such as the lengthening of consonants in a special phonolog- ical vicinity following the same pattern as the dialects of Trøndelag, and monophthongization and diphthongization resembling to some extent an East Norwegian pattern. These traits demonstrate that the Bergen diakct is not simply an "urbanized" version of the neighboring local dialects, but a result of early language contact between several Norwegian and foreign dialects. With regard to the social context, it may seem as if the typical Bergen dialect (=low speech) in the nineteenth century, for instance, functioned as the colloquial speech of all social classes, or at least to a larger extent than was typical for the low speech of most other towns, where the urban dialect was the dialect of the lower social classes concentrated in certain areas of the town (Larsen and Stoltz 1912: 19). They switched to "high speech"1 only in very formal situations. However, in this century Modern Bergen has adapted to the "normal" sociolmgulstic pattern that we know from Oslo and the rest of the western world, and the high speech even has local features different from both low speech and standard Bokmål (Pettersen 1991: 5f.). 2. "Talemål hos ungdom i Bergen" (TUB) {Speech among young people in Bergen] The TUB project was initiated by Helge Omdal and Egil Pettersen (University of Bergen) in the 1970s, a decade with greet sociolinguisdc interest (cf. the TAUS project presented by Hanssen in this issue) and favorable financing conditions for such investigations. Therefore, the aims of the project were extensive: to study the social and stylistic variation among young people, the language development during recent generations (note that the monograph on the Bergen dialect was published in 1912), and the diffusion of urban dialect features to the surrounding rural communities that had recently become urbanized parts of Bergen. The project — financed by the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities from 1978 to 1983 — based its analysis on recorded data of about 68 hours collected during the academic year 1978-1979. The total number of informants was 104, of whom 92 were pupils of the age 15-17, that is, bom in 1962-1964, and 12 were born in 1908-1909, which means that they were 70 years of age. This last group of elderly people represented the central area of Bergen, and they were nsed as a control group to reveal historical changes in the dialect. The young people represented today's Bergen county borough (="Bergen kom- mune"), which was extended as a local authority in 1972. For the purpose of this project it was divided into eight areas: Bergen Centre, Laksevåg, Fyllingsdalen, Fana Centre, Ytre (= "Outer") Fana, Indre (= "Inner") Arna, Ytre Arna, and Åsane (see Map 1). One of the methodological principles of the project was that the informants be born in the same part of the town as they represented, have lived there all their lives, and have attended primary school there and that their mothers be born and have grown up within the boundaries of today's Bergen. These were stiff terms, and in some of the new urbanized parts of Bergen it was difficult to find enough informants who met all these requirements; some exceptions had to be accepted. Within the framework set by these requirements, the school administration picked out the pupils to be used as informants. To cover the stylistic repertoire the informants were examined in different settings, first is a conversational group of two and two; later they were grouped four and four and took part in role playing, which contained both an informal and a formalized setting. 3. Findings and interpretation 3.1. Social variation Age. The only phoneme used in suffixes in the Bergen dialect, /e/, takes various forms depending on its phonetic position; it is especially sensitive to a following /*/. Moreover, this phonetic, or allophonic, variation appears to be socially relevant, and obviously open variants of the vowel •mMap !, Bergm rountv borough m TaMel. Xy <£ elsewhere) Yovng people Elderly people K a P-value !L Source: Johannessen (1984: 15). Social class. The socioeconomic groups in the project were defined on the basis of the parent's occupation. A rather typical pattern of statistical data appears when we look at the adverb <DÅ> "then". The traditional west Nordic form /do:/ has been quite frequent in Bergen low speech, but it is stigmatized as it diverges from Bokmål. The data broken down for social classes is displayed in Table 2. First, these figures demonstrate that there is no obvious difference between the two lower classes; on the other hand, there is a significantly higher score in social group I. Second, the relatively low percentages in all classes tell us that the regionally marked form /do:/ has a wide usage even in the higher social class. We then turn to the two most common sociolinguistic variables in Norwegian urban societies: the negative adverb (IKKJE) "not" and the personal pronoun 1st person singular <EG> "I". The first variable has the prestigious variant /"ike/ and the low status variant fiqe/. The personal pronoun has the forms /jsi/ and /e:(g)/ (see Table 3). Among elderly people we find a well-known gradual increase in scores of prestigious forms dependent on the socioeconomic class. Among young people, on the other hand, we find the prestigious variants to some extent only in the highest social class — notice the percentages 19.5 and 8.3 in social group 1 — but elsewhere they are scarcely evident.2 Looking more closely at out material we discovered, furthermore, that the relatively high average score of /"ike/ among young people in social Table 2. Social class: percentage oflugh speech Ida:] Social class % usage Source: Myking {1983b: 54). Social group %fike/ % /#/ young elderly young elderly peopk people peøpk peopk 1 W-5 717 8.3 67.4 2 1J 25.0 OS 23.4 3 14 0.4 i.o 13 Source: Myking (1983c: 91), U]bnd(l984:44.49). group 1 i: due to only a few informants who use /Ike/ almost consistently. Only Gve youngsters of the 92 in the investigation had a score of SO percent or more of this varianL All 6ve belonged to social group 1, four of them were girls, three of them came from Fana Centre and two from Bergen Centre. This group of Ave is, as we see, very homogeneous with regard to social variables. Interestingly, the same group of f ve also ranks highest as to the usage of the prestigious variant of the variables (EG> <WH-words>, and <DÅ> (Myking 1983c: 101). It is perhaps no surprise that this group is so homogeneous. On the other hand, it is interesting that this group is so small, 5 of 92, and that when this group is isolated there are no longer any significant differences concerning social das: and sex among the 87 remaining informants.

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