Socioiinguistic patterns in Bergen
HELGE SANDØY
Abstract
77* j%T%pM*(**Km 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 fre- quent 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 infor- mants 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 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> Sfj%& The results for the variables u % : Johannessen (1984: 15). z Sexfage: percentage of high speech sym Centre Social class Young people Elderly people male female male female i s Source: UHand (19&t 48f.). the TUB project. For the One clear difference will be discussed at the very end of this article. Otherwise there is one more significant difference in the expected direction and one in the opposite direction. Therefore, the major conclusion regard- ing sex differences is that they seem to vanish among young people. 3.2. Stylistic variation The most informal setting for data collection was when four informants were expected to chat without being observed and interrupted by the research people (^setting I). To introduce a formalized sequence, a university teacher who was unknown to the informants, and who spoke the Bergen high speech entered the room and started asking direct ques- tions (=setting F). In addition the informants were examined in conversa- tion groups of two and two {= setting C). One of the variables was related to "grammatical WH-words," that is, words with the varying initial consonants k- and v- (for instance, /vem] vordan, vorfbr/ opposed to /kern, kordan, korfbr/. The results from the different settings were as shown in Table 6. Table 6. Stvk Sadng Fi9quencyof&-farins ••mSource: Myking < 1988: 24 >. i Iptliii mammto fit well into a modem pattern. 3.3. Rural vs. urban 5§§£SÉHBKS£ y Table 7. Part øf toim: percentage faek of transitivity distinction /reported speech) Parts of town Relative frequency Bergen Centre Fyllingsdalen Laksevåg Fana Centre Fana ytre Ytre Arna Indre Arna Source: Myking (1983a: 37). to pairs of strong and weak verbs, which refers to the fact that the Bergen low speech has /Tigc/ in the meaning of both 'lie', and 'lay', the latter expressed by /lege/ in other dialects. The ranking in Table 7 corresponds strikingly well to a common under- standing of the degree of urbanization, and, in the two areas lowest on the list, Nynorsk is still used as the written standard. Table 7 may be interpreted as a visualization of how an urban low speech form has spread to the recently urbanized areas. If we return to the (DA) variable, we are able to observe a case where the urban low speech shares a form with the original rural dialects, and, thus, the variable illustrates the diffusion of a prestigious variant — or the other way around: the maintenance of a low-status form {see Table 8). Bergen Centre and Fana Centre have the lowest average frequency of the dialect form, and again the two Arna areas are on the opposite end. The data were examined more closely and it was found that in just the two central areas and in social group 1 there was an extraordinarily large Table 8. Percentage of low speech JdDzf in different parts of Bergen Part of town % usage Bergen Centre Fana Centre Fyllingsdalen Laksevåg Ytre Fana Ytre Arna Indre Arna Source Myking (1983k 56). Table 9. Significant difference/port of town Bergen Centre * ** * * Fana Centre * Fyllingsdalen Indre Arna Laksevåg Ytre Arna Source Myking (1983k 62). Key: +=<&05. **= <0.005, statistical variance in individual scores, whereas the other groups demon- strated a greater homogeneity. Therefore, a statistical experiment was carried out once more by picking out informants — this time the seven scoring less than 33.3 percent. Six of these seven were from social group 1, and in (act three of the seven were from Bergen Centre and two from Fana Centre. The new average scores for the rest of the informants were considerably increased, as compared to the original figures. Nevertheless, the two central areas were still significantly different from the four most rural areas, as shown in Table 9. The rural-urban contrast seems, therefore, to be sharper than the social one, and it cannot as easily be isolated to a few people (cf Jahr 1988). 4. The social direction of the development To sum up this survey of Bergen: we certainty witness a change both in social variation and in style norms in the direction of an overwhelming homogeneity. This is a general tendency for all variables we have ana- lyzed. Historically it may be a surprising result, but with some knowledge about the language situation in other towns it is no surprise. I could mention a lot of other reports from projects with a corresponding condu- sion that norms of language styks seem to have changed in Norwegian towns over the last decades. The situations in Trondheim, Ålesund, Haugesund, and Stavanger have been most thoroughly analyzed (cf! Fintoft and Mjaavatn 1980; Aarsæther 1984; Gabridsen 1984.1991). We rind a new homogeneity, mostly in favor of the previous low-status variety; the traditional high speech is on the retreat, or totally "dissolved." I leave the question open about whether this is true for the Oslo area. There, that is, in Eastern Norway, we encounter a more widely accepted norm (sometimes referred to as Standard East Norwegian), a parallel to which does not exist in the other regions of Norway. An interesting approach that we may use in order to understand why there are few obvious associations today between social class and lan- / guage is to see what characterizes or constitutes people's identities. Do people emphasize loyalty toward a social or a local group? People's wish for an identity can be revealed when the informants are allowed to describe (self-report) their speech. In the Bergen investigation many of the young people claimed, for instance, they were using the low- status form /"'myce/ "much" more consistently than they did in their actual speech on the tape recordings, ^myce/ is an expression of regional loyalty (to West Norway) and is the form of the low speech in Bergen, but it is no longer as frequent as the modem form fmyæf, which is regionally neutral.3 Several parallel instances told us that the youngsters believed they were more typical Bergeners than they really were. Therefore, they claimed to be using the marked Bergen forms; in this case /"myce/ instead of the usual fmy.sf form — a loan from the Bokmål standard. As there is no difference between local and low-status forms, we cannot decide which one of the two values — local or low status — is the most relevant. The most likely conclusion — to me at least — is that a local identity is looked upon positively, and that low-status speech is regarded as the clearest expression of the local distinctive feature. Here I would venture the hypothesis or sociolinguistic interpretation that the language conflict in towns is no longer on the axis or loyalty toward social class, but rather on the axis of loyalty toward either local or national-standard values. This can be illustrated by the fact that the old Bergen social contrast /vmøke/-/yine:get/ has been replaced by the regional-national contrast /Tniyce/-/Vmy:e/. One more parallel example from Bergen: in the control group of 12 elderly Bergeners, seven asserted they used the adverbial form /na:/ 'now', which has been the upper class speech form in Bergen. In actual speech, only two of them used /me/, and the total number of instances was only five, which in practice gave the percentage of 0 in our statistics. In all other cases of this temporal adverb only the form /no:/ was used, a form typical of the lower Bergen diakct (Omdal 1984: 11) (sec Table 10). Table 10. Percentage "now" Elderly Younger High-status /n»:/ Low-status /no:/ New Bokmå] form /no:/ Source: Myking (1983b: 51). 120 H. Sandøy It is interesting to notice that most of the young people (i.e. 80) claimed to use /no:/. Twelve claimed to use /no:/, and a somewhat smaller minority actually did so. None of the youths claimed to use ,/n»:/, and they did not use it either. Thus, from Table 10 we can see a historic development by which the old honorable form /htc/ totally disappears, surviving only in the ideals of elderly people. The new form /no:/ introduced in this variable corresponds to the Bokmål form and may function as a compro- mise between extreme values and will, thus, have a chance to expand its role. This form is not used at all by elderly people. There may be several possible causes for die decline of social marking: (I) class (inferences certainly persist in society, but there 6 much more social contact between the different classes, and the environment among young people has become fairly homogeneous; (2) there has been a trend of marking informality. This development is perhaps not exclusive to Norway. In many fields of social life we have got rid of formal differences in recent generations. This may be a consequence of modern mass culture. Some time ago I read an interview in a Bergen newspaper with a general manager, who strongly emphasized a new style of leadership. He wanted to annihilate what he called "the coat of iron"; that was the suit, tie, and formal distance between leaders and subordinates. This new style may also apply to the linguistic difference. The general trend of getting rid of the so-called coat of iron or formalities is — I think — quite general in the western world. But because of our language-political history, the linguistic effects are especially large in Norway. That, perhaps, is the only difference. 5. The linguistic direction of the development Finally, we should try to gain linguistic insight, to see how a socio- linguistic study can bring to light bow language may develop. In a more complicated study of the pronominal forms /e:g/ and /jei/ T we discov- ered a wide range of phonetic variety: /ja, jæ, æ, e^ «g/ and so on with various phonetic variants. As is normally the case, the forms in an unstressed position are less prominent than the parallels in stressed posir tion. The forms /a/ and /e/ are such reduced forms, which can be interpreted as neutral forms, as they can be a reduction of both /jd/ and /e:g/. Thus, they are a compromise, when you use them you have escaped the choice of marking social background or identification, which is some- times an inconvenient choice (see Table II). The problem of interpreting these data is how to understand the dropping of the g in /e:g/. The deletion of g could depend on various Sociolmguistic patterns in Bergen 121 Table 11. legi and f el in Bergen Consonant follows No consonant follows4 Source: UUand {1984: 36). phonetic features, for instance an initial consonant in the next word. Consider Table 11, where the 2768 instances of the variant /e/, that is, the form without g, totally dominate when preceding a consonant; the percentage is 90.4. Correspondingly, the form with /g/ is in the majority where no consonant follows. However, in this case the majority is not that solid; the percentage is 59.1. The phonetic context cannot account for ail the 855 instances of the form ,/e/. Our conclusion had therefore to be that the form /e/ is not simply a variant of a phonological variable, but to a larger extent is the result of a sociopsychological compromise, as speakers seem to prefer a strategy of neutrality. The result is an innovation in the dialect. This is an interpretation based also on statistical data showing that no informant varies between fyåj and /e:g/, which are the two extreme varieties. But the users of /jsi/ all have a dominating frequency of the form /e/, and the users of /e:g/ also use this form /e/. The most typical Bergen dialect feature is the two-gender system. Norwegian spoken elsewhere has three genders, of which masculine and feminine correspond to the Bergen common gender. The gender system appears in the declination of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, and furthermore in the pronouns used for anaphoric reference: in the rural dialects the masculine /han/ 'he' is used for masculine nouns, the feminine /ho:/ for feminine nouns, and fåtal 'it* for neuter nouns, whereas the Bergen masculine /han/ is used to refer to common-gender nouns; the feminine /hun/ is used only with reference to female persons. One aspect of linguistic urbanization is the transition from a three- gender system to a two-gender system. In the most rural parts of the borough there are still some people using the rural dialect, and they preserve the three-gender system quite well. But adjectives and pronouns in a position with obligatory grammatical concord with a noun often surface in the masculine form even though they are subordinate to a However, in social class 3 the pronunciation with /c/ is more usual for both the original sounds, and thus our examples are pronounced /gys/ and /pen/. The young people are fully aware of this "speech error." I think the following reply from a class in a secondary school in Fyllingsdalen — the area with most frequent exchanging in the direction of /c/ — is revealing: "I know that what I pronounce is wrong and that it should be /føn/. Bat it is far too affected to say!" Here the young people were reacting against the pressure of prestige and dissociated themselves by changing the pronunciation in the other direction. And this pronunciation with unvoiced fricative /c/, as injqmf for skjønn, etc., is expanding rapidly today. 6. Conclusion The TUB project has enabled us to study how sotiolinguistic contrasts are diminishing. This applies to the traditional difference between social classes and the two sexes and the association between language and the formality of a setting, and it can be parallelled with what we interpret as a more general democratic change in society following the Second World War. These findings are also supported by data from other towns in Western Norway, and they seem to suggest a new tendency in the socio- linguistic climate. Moreover, a stronger regional loyalty may be arising. We have observed some new linguistic forms emerging from the socio- linguistic "conflicts" in the Bergen dialect. University of Bergen 3. The traditional urban dialect will throughout this article be called "low speech" — for reasons of simplicity — even though this paragraph demonstrates that tMs term is not adequate with regard to the socioHnguistic function of this language variety. "High speech" will likewise be used as a technical term for the contrasting variety. 2. As the elderly informants represent only Bergen Centre, it can be argued that they should be compared only with the youngsters of Bergen Centre and not of the whole borough, as is done in Table 3. The figures for young people in Bergen Centre social; class 1.2. and 3 are 55.1.0.0, and 0.0 percent for rike/ (Myking 1983c: 104) and 20.0, 0,0, and 0.0 percent for fjtdf (Ulland 5984: 48). These resaits stress the point already made in this paragraph. 3. In the first decades of this century, a low-speech form f møke/ existed as a parallel to /vmyce/. The form /"møke/ was restricted to Bergen town only, and it has in fact disappeared today, as is also the case for the old high-speech form /vme:get/. 4. ftif is categorized as a "vowel" in this study. 5. /mi:n/ 'my', masculine form of the possessive pronoun; /mi:/, feminine form. 6. /an/ = 'it", a masculine anaphoric pronoun, here referring the feminine noun /"boksa/. References Aarsæther. Finn (1984). E syns alle folk snakka likt e! 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