Nordiacorp fieldwork in Dalsland and Värmland

On April 12th, Elisabet Engdahl and Andreas Widoff left Göteborg for three days of fieldwork in Bengtsfors in Dalsland, Köla in south-western Värmland and Dalby in northern Värmland.

In Bengtsfors, our attention was caught by a morphological curiosity that was not actually part of our planned research. Informants and other locals produced sentences like De får de nog vart and De skulle de vart, where vart may be an infinitive form of vara ‘be’, which coincides with the perfect varit of the same verb (frequently pronounced /vart/). However, it is also possible that this is an infinitive form of varda, the original Norse word ‘become’, in modern Swedish commonly used only in the imperfect vart. Being wise after the event, we should have asked the locals about this curious word.

Memorial in Köla. Locally the archaic variant <kiö-> is sometimes used instead of the official spelling <kö->.

A good ten kilometres from the Norwegian border, the Köla dialect shares some traits with Norwegian, which is quite obvious as regards phonology and vocabulary. Less obvious is perhaps that this proximity has some influence on the syntactic level as well. Except already well-known features, such as postnominal possessors of the type katten sin, we may notice that all informants, without reservation, accept the counterfactual sentence Har jag varit tio år yngre, har jag läst fysik (showing present har instead of imperfect hade), which is used in Norwegian but not commonly accepted in Swedish. In Dalby, also close to the Norwegian border, two of four informants accepted this sentence.

These results agree with the results of previous fieldwork conducted by Pål Kristian Eriksen in Torsby, Värmland. Some of the informants asked to complete Hvis jeg bare hadde valgt 5 i stedet for 4 på lottokupongen… wrote continuations such as så har jag vunn tio tusen. Since we have noticed a similar acceptance in Viby, Närke, the present tense in counterfactuals is perhaps more widespread than has been previously assumed.

In Dalby, we met with informants at Utmarksmuseet ‘the Backcountry museum’.

The most conspicuous feature of the dialects of northern Värmland is the pervasive operation of apocope, seemingly applying to all categories of words, including postnominal definite articles. This means that possessive phrases such as huset vårt ‘our house’ are realised as hus vårt. Not surprisingly, this delight in cutting words short results in many overlapping words, which, in turn, may have further effects on grammar. Actually, one informant provided a perceptive explanation for why he would not accept deletion of att ‘to’ in Jag gillar att dansa ‘I like to dance’: without the infinitive marker, in the Dalby dialect, Jä tycke om å dans ‘I like to dance’ would coincide with Jä tycke om dans ‘I like dance’. In fact, the informants would most of all prefer Jä tycke om te å dans, clearly distinguishing verb from noun.

Both the Köla and Dalby dialects show quite extensive systems of dialect interrogative words. In Köla, the younger informants reported masculine ocken ‘who’, feminine and plural ocka ‘who’, while the older informants seem to use a distinct plural form ockre. Other examples are hö ‘what’, hört ‘where’ (for both location and direction), höss ‘how’, hö mange ‘how many’, and höffer ‘why’. The interrogative words of Dalby are quite similar. The younger informants use masculine höcken ‘who’, feminine höcka ‘who’, and plural höcker ‘who’, while the older informants drop the initial /h/. As for the other words, they use hönt ‘what’, hör ‘where’ (location), hört ‘where’ (direction), nör ‘when’, höss ‘how’, hö mång ‘how many’, and höffer ‘why’.

Younger informants in Dalby.

Once again, it seems necessary to raise a methodological issue. The recording used was not properly adapted to the dialects of western and northern Värmland, which caused some problems with informants being disturbed by linguistic features not intended to be tested. Testing the use of possessive reflexive sin in relation to its antecedent, we had to reformulate the sentences to contain postnominal possessors – katten sin, gardinerna sina – since the informants did not accept sentences with prenominal possessors; and such a simple fact that some informants do not use the word mannen ‘the man’, but rather kärn, caused some disturbance. Similar problems have been noted in an earlier post, which once again stresses the importance of adapting each recording to the dialect under investigation.

/Andreas Widoff