Sundag 17. juni
I morgon skal Kristin Hagen og Arne Martinus Lindstad starta innsamlinga av norsk ScanDiaSyn-materiale. Første målepunkt ut er Stange i Hedmark, heimstaden til Arne Martinus. Spørjeskjemaet er ikkje heilt ferdig enno, men det skal bli spennande å høyra korleis det gjekk.
Sjølv er eg på veg til ICLaVE 4 på Kypros der eg skal ha to presentasjonar.
Lars Steensland and Peter Svenonius discussing Övdalian syntax (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes)
During four days of intense fieldwork, 22 linguists (including 7 professors) from Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland visited 7 villages as well as a school in Älvdalen in search for clues to current Övdalian syntax. We were superbly guided and supported by one of the foremost experts on Övdalian, prof. Lars Steensland, who also held one of the introductory lectures.
In total, 168 Övdalian informants were registered. This makes the workshop one of the largest Scandinavian dialect surveys in recent times. The following overview shows the distribution of informants across the villages:
Interviews at the school in Älvdalen. (Photo: Signe Laake)
village 1, Västmyckeläng: 26 informants
village 2, Åsen: 21 informants
village 3, Brunnsberg: 17 informants
village 4, Loka: 29 informants
village 5, Klitten: 19 informants
village 6, Blyberg: 27 informants
village 7, Evertsberg: 15 informants
the school (age group 13-15): 14 informants
total: 168 informants
As for age groups, 5 informants were born before 1920 (two were born in 1916), and 21 were born in the 1920s. Our youngest informant, who did not partake in any interviews but whose Övdalian has been documented on film, was born in 2004.
Considering that the number of speakers of Övdalian has been estimated to 3000, about 5,5% of the total number of speakers have participated in our investigations.
Old house in Åsen, Älvdalen (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes)
Although no results from the workshop have yet (June 4, 2007) been issued, we can conclude that Övdalian is a living language with a surprising number of interesting morphosyntactic features (a few examples: three genders, three cases, verb agreement, referential null subjects, negative concord, verb raising in embedded clauses, a complex prepositional system). Typologically, it seems to be a mixture of western and eastern Scandinavian linguistic features, as pointed out by Gunnar Nyström in one of the introductory lectures.
Several of the researchers who went to Älvdalen merely for linguistic purposes are now members of Ulum Dalska, the organization for preservation of Övdalian, which gave essential support to the workshop. Nù ir eð liuotwiktut at jåpums að so it övdalskà far!
– Henrik R
Henrik Rosenkvist summarizes the NORMS fieldwork on Övdalian at the closing dinner on 1 June. Lars-Olof Delsing (center) and Piotr Garbacz (right) were also involved in the organization (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes)
Timber wall of a barn in Evertsberg, Älvdalen (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes)
The NORMS Älvdalen experience is over for now, i.e. disregarding the work that lies ahead with analysing the material and the impressions from last week's intense investigations. We're back at our various home institutions. Peter, Gunnar Hrafn, and I drove our rental car back to Oslo airport (a 4 hour drive), and on our way we stopped in Nesvollberget in Trysil (Norway) to pay Kjell Sletten a visit. Kjell, native to Trysil, has become an Övdalian afficiado and a dedicated member of Ulum Dalska, and he showed up at Brunnsberg, Blyberg, and Evertsberg when we had our sessions there.
Kjell Sletten and his wife Anne at their home in Nesvollberget, Trysil (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes)
We were treated to coffee and waffels with various sorts of delicious home made jam by Kjell's wife, Anne, native to Rauland in Telemark, and during our short stop we managed to ask some hasty questions about their different dialects. Kjell's dialect has undergone monophtongization, but the monophtong derived from e.g. older /au/ is nevertheless distinct from other vowels in his phoneme inventory: /'ø:re/ ‘ear’ is distinct from /'œ:re/ ‘trout’ is distinct from /‘ä:re/ ‘black grouse’ (pardon my representation). And for the Rauland dialect we learned that degree ‘how’ is identical in form to manner ‘how’ (both høss) whereas ‘where’ and ‘what’ are distinct, thus conforming to my generalization that manner ‘how’ is always bigger or identical to degree ‘how’ across (Mainland) Scandinavian varieties.
Majstång från i fjol, Blyberg, Älvdalen (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes)
Today was our final day of fieldwork in Älvdalen; we visited two villages in the south of the region, namely Blyberg and Evertsberg. Once again, we were welcomed with a terrific turnout and were able to speak with a great number of residents. By the end of it all, we had interviewed 168 people, which represents something like 5% of the population of Övdalian speakers.
Linguists at work in Blyberg (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes)
In a long conversation with a gentleman from Evertsberg, I was able to confirm case and agreement patterns that obtained at previous sites, while also noting certain differences between the west and east bank dialects. He turned out to be quite a poet, and treated me to some of his original verses.
Tonight we had a celebratory dinner with the local organizers, and there were speeches and gifts and toasts and general merriment.
A note posted on boards around Evertsberg, calling speakers of Övdalian to meet with the NORMS researchers (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes)
In Evertsberg Linda Axelsson treated us to some local traditional music played on the violin and a kind of ruler, among other tunes this waltz composed by Ekorr-Anders ("Squirrel-Anders”) (MMS recording: Øystein A. Vangsnes).