N'CLAV Grand Meeting in Gottskär, Day 1

Monday August 22nd, 2011
The N'CLAV Grand Meeting in Gottskär outside Göteborg is now in process. Some 35 members of the network gathered by and by during the Monday afternoon and Gottskär greeted us all with an extremely beautiful summer evening, which we chose to leave to take part in the two initial talks of this second grand meeting of the N'CLAV Network.

In the first of these talks, Janne Bondi Johannessen and Signe Laake of the University of Oslo challenged a common opinion that Norwegian spoken in the USA, American Norwegian, is "old-fashioned". They showed from a comparison of their material of spoken American Norwegian and corpora of contemporary Norwegian that there is some ground to this statement. The vocabulary in American Norwegian is indeed more like the dialect spoken by the generation of the parents of the immigrants than contemporary Norwegian, but when it comes to grammar, there is not so much difference.

After this, the first of four invited speakers, Anders Eriksson presented the work with the project Swedia 2000 – a Swedish dialect database. Methods, results and organisation of the work was discussed. There is already a small public database at http://swedia.ling.gu.se with dialect data presented as transcriptions of spoken dialectal Swedish, translations to standard Swedish and sound files. This public database is a sample of the much larger research database of the project, consisting of recordings of more than 1300 speakers representing 107 Swedish dialects that will be launched soon. The recordings in the database are of two kinds, one controlled part where all speakers produce the same words for instance, and one part with spontaneous speech.

One of the methodological concerns that Anders Eriksson mentioned was the difficulty to ensure consistency when so many different people work with the transcription. One of the tools that the transcribers made use of, Eriksson told us, was a reference tool for the phonetic transcriptions, where they could listen to samples of for instance a vowel sound and compare with the dialect sample they were currently transcribing.

The research database of variation in Swedish dialects is at present work in progress, but researchers may get access to it quite soon, so stay posted at http://swedat.ling.gu.se where you find information about the project and the database, and also other things, as for instance a high quality map to download and use when you work with the material.

The day ended with a nice dinner at Gottskär Kurs & Konferens, after which we walked in the dark August night to our different lodgings.

/Maia