NORDiaCORP – Field work in Orust, Bohuslän, and Floby, Västergötland

The 11th and 12th of January Johanna Prytz and Maia Andréasson travelled to Henån in Bohuslän and Floby in Västergötland to perform the second field-work for the Göteborg group in NORDIACORP. Henån is located on the island Orust on the west coast of Sweden and the informants met with us in the local library the 11th of January.

At this library, for a change, the usual field work kit with hot coffee, extra woollen socks, mittens and preferably a plaid turned out not to be needed, since the heating was quite all right. In the local "hembygdsgårdar" we visited in Halland, and at the "Kyrkans hus" in Floby the 12th, we have been glad to have them.

The picture below shows two of the younger informants in Henån.

In Orust there are some local lexical varieties that stresses the need for using a really good speaker of the dialect for the recordings.

The dialect speaker that we used for Orust informed us that the word sliten and utsliten does not mean both 'torn, torn out' and 'worn out' in the local dialect, but only 'worn out'. For 'torn (out)' they use reven (standard Swedish riven).

This turned out to be of vital importance since the older informants rather disliked the sentences discussing a radio that had been sliten ut or utsliten but accepted them totally when the verb was reven ut or utreven. The result is that all informants in Orust, just as those in Frillesås, accept incorporation of verb particles both with är ('is') and blev ('became') as the copular verb.

Another lexical difference is the local supine form skutt in Orust. Both young and older informants accepted the sentence Där blev skutt många älgar förra veckan (gloss: 'there became shot many moose last week'). We double checked that the form was used with har ('have') and hade ('had') to see that it really was a supine. The standard Swedish form skjutit did not get the same high scores. Generally it is very difficult to get the informants to hear the difference between the supine form skjutit and the participle form skjutet.

In Floby we got higher scores than on other places for Den boken kommer jag inte ihåg om jag läste den with the resumptive pronoun den, with an average of 3.75 for Floby and 1,5 for the other locations.

The picture to the left shows the two older informants at the "Kyrkans hus" in Floby.

The double supine forms in the sentence Han hade länge velat läst den där boken om maffian were only OK for the younger informants in the two locations in Halland, but in Orust and Floby also the older informants accepted this sentence. Maybe we will see some more acceptance of this sentence when we get further to the north?

When it comes to local forms for interrogative pronouns the informants in Orust use hurre for standard Swedish hur ('how') in Hurre var det? ('How was that?') and Hurre många blir det? ('How many will there be?'). This form might correspond to the old Swedish huru that one of the older informants in Frillesås, Halland, sometimes use: Huru många blir't. The older informants of Orust also use hudden for standard Swedish hurdan in the sentence Hudden är han ('What is he like?').

/Maia Andréasson