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Grand Meeting in Älvdalen 2009

Status report for ScanDiaSyn

August 2009

Øystein A. Vangsnes

The main activity within the ScanDiaSyn collaboration is now taking place within the frame of NORMS, the Norwegian subproject (NorDiaSyn; supported by the Research Council of Norway), and a new grant from NOS-HS to a subproject termed Nordic Dialect Corpus and Collaboration. Infrastructure development Infrastructure grants from the University of Oslo and NordForsk have over the last couple of years made it possible to develop the Nordic Dialect Corpus and the Nordic Syntactic Judgement Database. A demo version of the corpus was launched in the summer of 2008 and both the adding of more data and further development of interface and functions is currently receiving full attention at the Text Laboratory at the University of Oslo. A NordForsk-funded PhD course related to the ScanDiaSyn infrastructure was organized at Fefor in June 2009. Data collection - The collection of speech and questionnaire data from 11 Danish measure points was completed in 2008 in the DanDiaSyn subproject . - The collection of mainly questionnaire data from about 35 Icelandic measure points was completed in 2008 in the IceDiaSyn subproject. - Speech data from over 100 measure points in the Swedish dialect area (including Finland), inherited from the SweDia 2000 project, is also being added to the corpus, and collection of questionnaire data from about half of these measure points will be carried out in 2009-2010. - The collection of both speech and questionnaire data from about a 100 measure points in Norway will be completed in 2010 and added to the corpus and database. - Speech data from Faroese dialects were collected during the NORMS fieldwork in the Faroe Islands in 2008, and further questionnaire data will be collected in 2009. NorDiaSyn In december 2008 the Research Council of Norway decided to support a four year Norwegian subproject under ScanDiaSyn in the period 2009-2012. The subproject (NorDiaSyn) is carried out as a collaboration between the groups at the University of Oslo, NTNU (Trondheim), and the University of Tromsø with Professor Janne B. Johannessen (UiO) as the responsible project manager. The grant from RCN makes possible the completion of data collection – both recordings and questionnaire data – from at least a 100 measure points in Norway, and this work is now being carried out at full speed. The grant furthermore comprise a three year postdoc position (UiO) and a PhD position (NTNU), and these positions are now being filled. NorDiaCorp In January 2009 NOS-HS granted their support to two workpackages in an application termed Nordic Dialect Corpus and Collaboration (NorDiaCorp). The two workpackages involve (i) the collection of questionnaire data from about 50 measure points in Sweden and Finland and (ii) four researcher person years for the development of overviews and pedagogical presentations on the basis of the data that will be made available through the dialect corpus and the database. The data collection in Sweden and Finland will be carried out in 2009 and 2010, and together with the recordings from the SweDia 2000 project this will give fairly parallel data resources from the Swedish and the Norwegian dialect areas. Responsible project leader for the NorDiaCorp project is Dr. Øystein A. Vangsnes (UiT). Atlases, overviews, and dissemination The four researcher person years in NorDiaCorp and the postdoc position in NorDiaSyn mean that there is a solid basis for doing comparative research on the data which have so far been collected under the ScanDiaSyn umbrella over the last years. - A collection of papers on Övdalian syntax will appear either late 2009 or early 2010. - A collection of papers on Faroese syntax based on the NORMS fieldwork in August 2008 is currently under way. - A collection of papers on Northern Norwegian dialect syntax is under way. - A collection of papers on Northern Ostrobothnian dialect syntax is being planned. - A collection of papers on North Germanic exclamatives will appear either late 2009 or early 2010. Network activities The network grant from NordForsk will last throughout 2009 and is the main financial source for the 5th Grand Meeting for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax in Älvdalen in August 2009. A new three-year NordForsk network, Nordic Collaboration on LAnguage Variation (N'CLAV) will commence in 2010. This network will have a broader perspective on Nordic language variation (not just syntax, not just North Germanic), and the main activity will be annual grand meetings and annual short and intensive fieldworks. The NORMS project will last throughout 2010 and a closing seminar/workshop for NORMS is tentatively to be held in conjunction with a combined Grand Meeting for ScanDiaSyn and N'CLAV in Tromsø in the second week of June 2010 (moreover also tentatively followed by CGSW 25). Within NORMS the sixth intensive fieldwork was organized in Hedmark (Norway) and Värmland (Sweden) in May 2009 and the seventh will take place in Fosen in Trøndelag 20-23 September 2009. A number of thematic workshops have been held during the past year. An overview of the activities in NORMS can be found on this page. NOS-HS has funded a series of exploratory workshops on research infrastructure for language variation (RILiVS), and a larger meeting in this series will take place in Oslo 17-18 September. These series bring together several Nordic networks and research groups that work on language variation (ScanDiaSyn, Medieval Nordic Text Archive (Menota), Swedish Dialect Database (the extension of SweDia 2000), and a network for Saami Documentation and Revitalization) and reach out for cooperation with other groups in Europe and elsewhere.