Abstract

In my talk, I will discuss some problems and perspectives in dealing with non-standard dialectal varieties. I use the Norwegian linguistic situation as my example, but I assume that the problems and perspectives that I discuss are relevant for any linguistic community to varying degrees.

I start by discussing the socio-historical setting of the Norwegian language, focusing on the two written standards and the many spoken dialects and the relation between written and spoken varieties. Then I give a very brief presentation of some basic morphological and syntactic properties of Norwegian. In the main part of my talk, I will focus on four non-standard properties, namely dative case, agreement inflection of passive participles, absence of V2 in direct wh-questions, and verb particles and word order. I will end my talk by discussing the usefulness of the Universal Bilingualism approach (Roeper 1999) to the non-standard phenomena dealt with.

The idea of social responsibility, at one level, invites us to act and to reclaim agency. What as users and practitioners of language, we can do in the social and professional lives in creating environments that promote vigorous intellectual inquiry, disseminate research-based information, and cultivate equitable and respectful communication across languages by collaborating with the community of speakers in the capacity building and development of their languages. At another level, it also informs us about discursive space organized around specific ideologies of language and interest. For this discursive space to make sense, languages have to be understood as things we can count, as bounded spaces, dependent in some ways and independent in some other ways of other forms of social practice. This presentation brings both the senses of social responsibility, and situates it in the discursive space to explore the ideologies of language, the struggles over them and other ideologies of legitimacy and social justice.