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

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