The Diffusion of a New Morphology in Norwegian Dialects

Abstract

The most obvious tendency in modern Norwegian dialect change is regional levelling. The aim of this paper is to discuss the pattern of this levelling process, and I aim to test a hypothesis of urban jumping. This will be tested in detail for the region of Mid-Norway, with Trondheim at the top of a hierarchy and other towns and centres as subordinated nodes. The noun morphology of five dialects in Mid-Norway is compared, and we see that the regional capital of Trondheim has a fairly complex system compared to its subordinated towns and centres. The subordinated towns have been exposed to simplifications independent of the Trondheim dialect. The modern changes themselves are dependent on the urbanisation process, which has prevailed at different times in the various communities. Linguistically ‐ in our case in noun morphology ‐ the process seems to be more in the nature of simplification than of adapting the prestigious standard or central system. Accordingly, the new hypothesis suggests the following: Within a region, the dominating centre exerts some influence on the direction of language change, but the simplification processes manifest themselves first in new centres, i.e. in subordinated nodes in the regional hierarchy. Today the Trondheim dialect seems to be adopting certain simplifications. In the other towns and centres these changes were known generations ago. From these bare facts one could perhaps deduce that the regional centre of Trondheim is sensitive to changes in the subordinated towns. This conclusion is strengthened by data from Northern Norway, but not from Eastern Norway, where the changes seem to follow a different route.