NORDiaCORP fieldwork in Halland, Sweden

December 9th and 10th, Johanna Prytz and Maia Andréasson visited two locations in Halland on the west coast of Sweden. This was the first field-work for the Göteborg section of WorkPackage1 in NorDiaCorp. Our aim has been to locate informants that participated in the SweDia 2000 project ten years ago and ask them to supplement the former investigation by evaluating word orders in the ScanDiaSyn questionnaire.

Tracking down the informants has not been easy. The older informants are evidently now ten years older; they may have trouble hearing or coming to the location where the interviews are to take place. The younger informants may have moved from the neighbourhood altogether, and some of them have got married and changed their last name. Nevertheless, as much as seven out of eight of the informants we met with in Halland were also in the original SweDia 2000 investigation. And, luckily, when we get in contact with the old informants, they seem to be more than happy to meet with us. One informant even called it an early Christmas gift that we were coming.

In Frillesås, Halland, we first met with the two older informants at the old people's home, where one of the informants from SWEDIA2000 lives. Unfortunately, one of them had difficulties hearing the recorded sentences in the questionnaire, so we ended up reading the sentences out loud, in our Göteborg dialect. Since Frillesås is only half hour's drive from Göteborg, this is no disaster, but it made us reflect upon the risks we take when very old informants have bad hearing. There is a chance that a person with reduced hearing will want to please the interviewers by interpreting fragments of a sentence as something familiar, and not admitting that they did not catch the whole thing in it's entirety. Since we are investigating very subtle differences in word order this may leave us with unreliable data.

The older male informant discussed the Frillesås dialect and made some remarks of it having traits from Danish, English, but also – in discussing this with Maia – of the fishermen's dialect of Donsö in the Southern archipelago of Göteborg.

The two younger informants met with us in "Kulturgården" in Frillesås. The informants were old schoolmates, very nice and did simultaneously burst into laughter whenever they heard some of the word orders that are perfectly OK in other areas of the Nordic countries. There were some differences in judgements between the older and the younger informants. The younger were more inclined to accept for example double supine forms (i.e. Han hade länge velat läst den där boken om maffian), vart instead of blev as an auxiliary, and they also accepted the adverbs vart for existence and var for direction in questions.

In Våxtorp, we met with all the informants in "Hembygdsgården". The two older informants had grown up in the same hamlet. Just as in Frillesås we had to read out some of the sentences aloud, due to one of the informant's hearing problems. The younger informants had no problems with the recordings.

Here, there were not as clear differences between younger and older informants as in Frillesås. The young informants here did not accept vart as an auxiliary instead of blir and they did not accept the adverbs vart for location and var for direction in questions

Interestingly, there was a difference in judgement between the older and younger informants both in Frillesås and in Våxtorp. In the section of particle placement, we ask the informants to judge between (a) Kan jag få en glass till? where the particle is final and (b) Kan jag få en till glass? where the article precedes the object. At both locations the younger informants accepted both word orders, while the older informants rejected (b). "My grandchildren talks like that!" one of the older informants stated about this word order. The younger informants apparently belong to the grandchild generation.

/Maia Andréasson