NORW 396
Directed Undergraduate Research: The Norwegian Multiethnolect, spring 2021 (sophomore year)
Course Description
The Norwegian Multi Ethnolect (NMET) is used by linguists to define an emerging, distinct variety of language which reflects the evolving nature of Norwegian society. Its origin is the immigrant youth in the eastern parts of Oslo, most of whom identify as Muslim, but has become very common in all parts of Norway. While it is a form of Norwegian language, the NMET can be challenging for language learners to understand at first. However, with exposure and training, the NMET is quite accessible. Together we will create an online linguistic database of MET and curriculum modules for Norwegian language learners.
Course Content
Rationale
From my original proposal: This Directed Undergraduate Research, led by Kari Lie Dorer, examines the use of a variety of Norwegian often used by minority youth, known as kebabnorsk. This applies linguistic theory to critical analysis of Norwegian discourse surrounding minorities and minority language. Language discrimination is a prevalent phenomena, which this course attempts to conclude more about in the context of Norway.
Research Report
Each student in this course chose an individual project about some aspect of NMET to focus on. I chose to examine lexical items from NMET pulled from the novel we read in this course, Tante Ulrikkes vei by Zeshan Shakar. I created a list of the most used NMET lexical items in the novel and searched the No-Ta Corpus for occurrences of these words. I then analyzed the geographical distribution of the use of these lexical items and made inferences about the spread of NMET through popular media and youth culture. Linked below are my abstract and the final research report of my findings from this project.
Research Presentation
After writing my report diving into this project, I gave a presentation to the other students involved in the DUR about my findings in the analysis described above. The slides are linked below.
Takeaways
From this course, I learned how to conduct research using corpus data, which I did again for my senior project. I was also able to draw conclusions about the spread of vernacular forms of language, especially among young people. This course relied heavily on an understanding of how language discrimination works and how minority forms of language are formed and maintained, and deepened my understanding of these topics. This was also my first experience with conceiving of a research question and conducting an original investigation with data collection in order to answer the question, which was very informative for me.
Connections
This course connects to the several other projects I did on the topic of the Norwegian multiethnolect. Prior to this course, I completed two presentations on NMET, one for LNGST 245 (Roles of Language in Equity and Diversity) and one for NORW 260 (Introduction to Germanic Linguistics). The pages for these courses are linked below.
I continued my geographic analysis of NMET using the No-Ta Corpus in LNGST 301, instead focusing on syntactic and morphological features of NMET rather than lexical items. The page with information about this project as well as my full final report is linked below.