Spoken Norwegian in Today's Oslo : On Language Use by Adolescents in MultiEthnic Settings

INGVILD NISTOV
University of Bergen, Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature

The presentation will report from an ongoing project addressing linguistic practices by adolescents in Oslo, The study forms a part of a larger national project, UPUS (Utviklingsprosesser i urbane spraakmiljø) –Developmental processes in urban linguistic environments. The UPUS project’s aim is to explore the characteristics of the linguistic repertoire of the city in Norway today. The Oslo-project focuses on the ethnic dimension and attempts to discover whether it is possible to identify a “multiethnic” style or variety of Norwegian as spoken by adolescents in multiethnic and multilingual settings. One main issue is how to distinguish possible “multi-ethnolects” from learner varieties. Language use is examined in terms of both form and function. Data is collected from different speech situations and the informants include Oslo youth from families with immigrant backgrounds as well as ethnic Norwegian families. The project is a collaboration between researchers from various fields - sociolinguistics, dialectology, pragmatics, and second language acquisition.

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