This is a repository copy of Can Parallelingualism save Norwegian from extinction?. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/43553/ Article: Linn, Andrew R (2010) Can Parallelingualism save Norwegian from extinction? Multilingua, 29 (3/4). pp. 289-305. ISSN 0167-8507 https://doi.org/10.1515/mult.2010.014 Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version - refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher’s website. 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LINN Abstract Language extinction is one of the most pressing issues in linguistics today, and the literature is full of discussion about how to combat it. Statements that Norwegian is amongst the languages that are already extinct are merely examples of a widespread tendency in the literature towards errone- ous information about Norwegian. Nonetheless, there is clear evidence that Norwegian is undergoing a process of ‘domain loss’, and policies to address this form of language shift lie at the heart of the most recent developments in the history of language planning in Norway. A policy of parallelingual- ism is widely advocated, but without proper sanctions in higher education and in the business world for infringements of the parallelingual strategy, it is unlikely to have much effect. Keywords: Norwegian; domain loss; parallelingualism, reversing language shift; language extinction; language policy; language planning 1. Extinction According to an authoritative recent publication on the languages of the world, Norwegian is already extinct. The final volume of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics includes a List of languages (Brown 2006: 143Ϫ487), and on page 373 of this list we learn that there are four varieties of Norwegian: Norwegian Sign Language with 4000 users; Bokma˚l which is ‘extinct’; Nynorsk, ‘extinct’; and Trav- eller Norwegian, also ‘extinct’. Norwegian Sign Language (NSL) is in robust health. According to the 2008 government paper on the language situation in Norway (Ma˚l og meining ϭ Kultur- og kyrkjedepartementet 2008) there are in fact more like 16,500 NSL users, and indeed Sign Language has been one of the principal beneficiaries of Ma˚l og meining which recognises NSL as an official language and enshrines its status in Multilingua 29 (2010), 289Ϫ305 01678507/2010/029Ϫ0289 DOI 10.1515/mult.2010.014 ą Walter de Gruyter AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR 290 Andrew R. Linn law (Schrøder 2008). Traveller Norwegian is more correctly known as Rodi and is/was spoken by indigenous traveller people in Norway. Eth- nologue (Lewis 2009) reports its status as “active” as of 1997, but its current status is less sure, and it is not unreasonable for the encyclopedia to list it as extinct (in the absence of available evidence to the contrary), a casualty of the ongoing process of language extinction in the teeth of social and economic pressures on small language communities. The suggestion that Bokma˚l and Nynorsk are extinct is however plainly ab- surd. Bokma˚l is the majority written language of Norway, and even the less-used Nynorsk has around 600,000 users (Grepstad 2005). The data behind the List of languages in Brown (2006) is taken from Ethnologue.TheEthnologue entry for Norwegian is slightly misleading as it treats the language as existing in two dialects, Bokma˚l and Nynorsk, when in fact these are written varieties used alongside the numerous spoken dialects. However, there is no evidence that Norwegian is extinct in any of its modern varieties, and in fact Ethnologue records the popula- tion of Norway as 4,640,000 and describes the language as ‘fully devel- oped’. Not all residents of Norway are users of the Norwegian language, but the population continues to grow. According to Statistics Norway (http://www.ssb.no) the population stood at 4,858,200 on 1 January 2010 and by 1 April it had grown by a further 15,000, many of whom will acquire Norwegian as a first or second language. On the statistical evi- dence (and indeed on the evidence of common sense), there is no reason to believe that the key varieties of Norwegian are extinct or heading in that direction, and we have to assume that the statements in Brown (2006) are an unfortunate consequence of the reporting system used by Ethnologue. Whatever the reason, they are a striking example of the point made in detail by Engh (2006) that references to Norwegian (and by extension, one assumes, other less widely known languages) in the international linguistics literature are invariably wrong. The scant regard apparently paid to correct data by professional linguists does not give much hope to their ability to champion, support and protect those lan- guages in an informed way. Languages do die (or become extinct), of course, and the phenomenon is widely reported and discussed. I would go so far as to suggest that this is the key issue in linguistics today. Linguistics is a plastic discipline. Language is everywhere, so linguistics can go everywhere. Where it goes is dictated by what other disciplines are currently fashionable, which in turn is dictated by whatever issues are currently at the top of the agenda in society in general. It is no surprise therefore that linguistics is cur- rently coloured by ecological debates. On 4 February 2010 The Guardian newspaper reported the death of Boa Sr, the last surviving fluent speaker of Aka-Bo, a language of the Northern group of the Great Andamanese AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR Can parallelingualism save Norwegian from extinction? 291 family (Watts 2010). The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics re- ported this language in 2006, like Norwegian, as extinct, and now Eth- nologue concurs. It is an emotive story, and the Guardian report is ac- companied by a large photograph of Boa Sr under the heading ‘Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies: Death of Boa Sr, last person fluent in the Bo language of the Andaman Islands, breaks link with 65,000-year-old culture’. K. David Harrison’s 2007 book When languages die also contains pictures of some of the last speakers of lan- guages from across the world, haunting pictures bringing life to human tragedies, where the disappearance of the languages is a side-effect of much more serious issues. Nettle & Romaine (2000) take the same ap- proach: they look back and lament that ‘about half the known languages of the world have vanished in the last five hundred years’ (2000: 2). Harrison looks forward and predicts that ‘at the current pace, we stand to lose a language about every 10 days for the foreseeable future’ (Har- rison 2007: 5). Readers of Multilingua do not need to be reminded of the statistics which form the backdrop to so much work in theoretical and applied language work at the moment. What may surprise readers, how- ever, is the serious suggestion by Norway’s most high-profile linguist that Norwegian may be on track to join Aka-Bo and that policies are re- quired to prevent the inevitable. Indeed, it may seem arrogant and insen- sitive to suggest that the plight of Norwegian and its speakers might be comparable with that of Aka-Bo and Boa Sr, but there are genuine anxi- eties in Norway, and it has been politically expedient to marshal these anxieties under an ecological banner, as we shall see in the next section. 2. Language planning in Norway Norwegian is literally the textbook case of a planned language, a lan- guage whose development has been deliberately directed by the authori- ties. The textbook in question is Haugen (1966), and Haugen invented the term language planning to describe the Norwegian situation (Haugen 1959), although the theory and practice of language planning have bur- geoned exponentially over the past half century, and language planning is now felt to be more of an issue for developing countries than a Euro- pean concern (but see the case studies in Kaplan & Baldauf 2005Ϫ2007). I have summarised the history of language planning in Norway else- where (e.g. Linn & Oakes 2007: 72Ϫ85), but there are two reasons for presenting some historical context here. Firstly, as Engh (2006: 3) writes: Most astonishing … is the extent of the deficient documentation of Norwegian. No sophisticated statistics is needed to detect a clear ten- dency: Of all the papers with Norwegian material written by foreign AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR 292 Andrew R.