Senior Capstone Project
Rand Scholar Award Project
Dialectal Development and Comparison: Norwegian in the U.S. and Norway
Abstract
While a great deal of scholarly literature on the influence of English on American Norwegian exists, the present report focuses on the impact Norwegian dialects, which vary vastly from one another, have had on one another in the post-immigration period. This research on Norwegian dialects contextualizes itself within previous research on Norwegian, both in Norway and in North America. Using original interview recordings created by Terje Joranger and Odd Lovoll (1995-2002) of heritage Norwegian speakers and interview transcripts from the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS), a comparative dataset was created in order to analyze dialectal change over generations. The report focuses on three features of dialect variability in Norwegian, including first and third pronoun use, the negation adverb, and question words. In synthesizing the information from this dataset and comparing research to modern scholarship, the findings aligned with research from Johannessen and Laake (2015) and Hjelde (2015) that heritage Norwegian has undergone an incomplete koniéization process. The end of this report discusses the suggestion that modern Norwegian may be headed in a more leveled direction as well. This research is funded by the Rand Scholar Award (2022-2023) through St. Olaf College and the generous donations of Mary Rand Taylor and Ron Taylor. Special thanks to the benefactors of this research, as well as the Rand Committee, Dr. Nora Vosburg, and the Norwegian-American Historical Association.
Project Steps
Proposal
In order to receive funding for this project, I applied in the spring of 2022 for the Rand Scholar Award. In my proposal, I laid out my topic, the sample I wanted to use, my proposed methods, and the format of my final results. After having worked at the Norwegian-American Historical Association (NAHA) and having come across previously unused interview recordings of heritage Norwegian speakers created by Odd Lovoll and Terje Joranger, I wanted to employ these in a comparative study of Norwegian dialect influence in the U.S. and in Norway. The proposal, found below, was originally submitted to the Rand Committee and explains the rationale behind this project, which I was granted the funding for and which became my senior final project.
Research
After receiving funding for this research, I began transcribing and translating the interview recordings created by Odd Lovoll and Terje Joranger in order to use them as a dataset for this project. Once I had 15 respondents I could use for my database, I matched these with 15 additional respondents from the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS) in order to create a larger comparative dataset. I was then able to investigate the dialectal features employed by these 30 respondents and compare my findings to modern scholarship on the subject. Below, you can find my IR application, which displays my course rationale, as well as my full final report with a complete discussion of my findings from this original research.
iPedagogical application
In order to supplement my research course and to make this information more widely accessible, I decided to present my findings to an intermediate Norwegian classroom. This was a good practice for my public presentation and allowed me to share my findings to an audience familiar with Norwegian. This fit well with the curriculum of the course, as students were learning about Norwegian dialects at the point in the semester when I came to their classroom. I was able to better refine my findings and conclusions as well as my presentation as a result of this pedagogical application. Ultimately, I wanted to be able to share my research and make these materials more accessible. Linked below are my slides as well as a full audio recording of this classroom presentation.
Public presentation
As the culmination of this research, I presented my findings in a public presentation on May 1st, 2023. This presentation is customary for all Rand Scholars in the spring of the academic year, after research has been completed. I spent a good deal of time revising this presentation and cultivating it for a public audience, making the assumption that many would be unfamiliar with the Norwegian language and would need some background information in order to understand the findings of this research. This presentation lasted 45 minutes, with a 15-minute Q&A section. Below are the public slides I used for this presentation, my full bibliography for the presentation and this report, and finally, the full recording of my public presentation, including the Q&A section.
Takeaways
What did I learn from this project? What was the purpose of this research?
This project truly was a culmination of all that I have learned during my time at St. Olaf and was an extremely rewarding experience. In this research, I was able to combine both of my majors and covered a topic that deeply interests me. This assignment involved very close analysis of language and drawing sociolinguistic inferences, among other things. Significantly, as well, I was able to make use of archival recordings that had been mostly unused in scholarship and make the information from these recordings more publicly accessible to those who might be interested. Through this project, I learned a lot about the transcription process and the analysis of linguistic data, but also how to conduct my own research in a meaningful way that contributes to the field. I am so grateful that I received the opportunity to complete this research and hope that it informs more research on the same subject in the future.