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Happy New Year 2009!

January 8, 2009

Dear participants and affiliates of the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax collaboration!

Happy New Year!

2008 has proven to be yet another year full of exiting activities within our network, ranging from data collection for the joint ScanDiaSyn dialect collection to focused workshops on specific topics. Two NORMS fieldworks have been organized, one on Western Jutlandic last January and the other on Faroese in August. A full overview of the activities can be viewed here and at this site you will also see some of the upcoming events in ScanDiaSyn. Notice in particular that there will be a NORMS fieldwork on "Inner Scandinavia" in May and that the next Grand Meeting will be organized in Älvdalen ultimo August.

The final NordForsk year
We are now entering the final year with a dedicated network grant from NordForsk. We have accomplished a lot so far under the ScanDiaSyn umbrella, and the collaboration will definitely continue also after 2009. There are at least two very good reasons for carrying on: The collaboration is too frutiful to not be continued and there are certain tasks that need to be carried out before we can say that we have fully reached our goals. The NORMS project will continue throughout 2010, and as you may know, we have just obtained a grant from the Research Council of Norway for the Norwegian part of ScanDiaSyn: "NorDiaSyn" will run for four years from now until the end of 2012, and it involves a postdoc and a PhD position plus money for further database development.

The database/corpus
A major milestone reached in 2008 is that a preliminary version of what we now call the Nordic Dialect Corpus and Database is up and running, i.e. our online searchable database of dialect material where transcribed text is aligned with sound and/or video of the raw material.
See this page where you for the time being can log in by entering the word displayed to the right as both username and password. Feedback on the search interface and functions are most welcome! The computational development of the database has until now been facilitated by grants from NordForsk and from the University of Oslo, and will continue as a part of the NorDiaSyn grant (cf. above).

Remaining tasks
Major remaining tasks at this point are on the one hand to develop the questionnaire part of the database and to fill our joint research resource with comparable material from all parts of the Scandinavian dialect continuum. Roughly put, we now have, either concretely or in terms of available funding, both free speech material and questionnaire data from Norway and Denmark, spoken material from Sweden and Finland (inherited from the SweDia 2000 project, now termed SweDat), questionnaire data from Iceland, and we will get both questionnaire data and spoken material from the Faroe Islands through the Farose project obtained by the Icelandic group.

Hopes for additional funding
It should then be fairly evident where the loop holes in the database are, and at a group leader meeting in August we agreed to focus on filling these gaps. Another major future task is to develop informative and pedagogical presentations based on our investigations, in effect maps and overviews. As a first measure in these directions an application was submitted primo October for the NOS-HS "NORDCORP" call. One of the four workpackages in the proposal focuses on supplementary data collection (questionnaires) in Sweden and Finland. Another and more comprehensive one (budgetwise) is dedicated at developing maps and overviews. The third WP asks for money to continue and develop the network whereas the fourth will enable future focused dialect excursions à la the NORMS fieldtrips.

We will know whether our application is supported by the end of this month. We have just received a peer review of the proposal which is very positive. That does not guarantee a positive outcome, however, as the NOS-HS board is free to make its decision on independent grounds. (In the back of our minds we are of course well aware of the fact that NOS-HS already has spent considerably resources on our collaboration through the NORMS grant and through the grant for project administration 2005-2007.)

Getting there
In any event, we will continue to look for funding of the remaining tasks and to keep up the research activity in our network. In last year's New Year's greeting (which was written in Norwegian and which can be viewed here) I estimated that we should stand fair chances of launching the common Scandinavian dialect syntax database and corpus in 2010. This remains a realistic goal, as far as I can judge.

Research and publication
Before rounding off this status report and New Year's greeting I would like to mention that there are currently several publications under way in the realm of our collaboration, most of them building on activities within NORMS. A number of paper collections are being prepaired which focus on specific dialects and dialect areas such as Övdalian, Northern Norwegian, Faroese, and Norra Österbotten. In addition come publications on particular syntactic topics. Ultimately, the research findings that dissemenate from our joint efforts, are a most valuable contribution to the field of linguistics: Do not forget that we have the power to shake and shape the understanding of grammar and the human language faculty!


Keep up the good work in 2009!


All the best,


Øystein