The Linguist

English The close cultural and political bonds between Denmark and Norway were broken in 1814 by the Treaty of Kiel. Danish De tætte kulturelle og politiske bånd mellem Danmark og Norge blev brudt i 1814 ved Freden i Kiel. Bokmål, example 1 De tette kulturelle og politiske båndene mellom Danmark og Norge ble brutt i 1814 ved Kielfreden. Bokmål, example 2 De tette kulturelle og politiske bånda mellom Danmark og Norge blei brutt i 1814 ved Kielfreden. Nynorsk, example 1 Dei tette kulturelle og politiske banda mellom Danmark og Noreg blei brotne i 1814 ved Kielfreden. Nynorsk, example 2 Dei tronge kulturelle og politiske banda mellom Danmark og Noreg vart brotne i 1814 ved Kielfreden. @CIOL_Linguists WINTER 2023 The Linguist 13 FEATURES in the children's own dialect. Dialects are used by news and weather presenters, in the Norwegian parliament and in the courts. It is very unlikely that a Norwegian will change dialect to accommodate someone. After all, it is their identity and linguistic sense of self. An education in diversity To teach Norwegian outside of the Norwegian context requires acute awareness from teachers about the two standards and multiple dialects. There are significant implications when teaching in a university environment with set educational goals, examinations and other assessments, teaching to a curriculum consistent with the Danish and Swedish courses (which do not have to deal with as much orthographical and dialectal diversity). Within the UK at least, the institutions which offer full degree programmes in Norwegian teach students to write Bokmål, and effectively to speak in Bokmål in an Oslo/eastern Norwegian accent. I am guilty of perpetuating this approach in my own teaching. But herein lies another issue: that neither Bokmål nor Nynorsk is completely monolithic in its standardisation. Within both standards there is variation in spelling, choice of vocabulary and even aesthetic/dialectal representation – a phenomenon called valgfrihet, valfridom or, if you prefer, valgfridom ('freedom of choice'). In Nynorsk, one can choose to use 'a' or 'e' on the end of infinitives ('to be'; å vere or å vera); to use å verte/a or å bli ('to become'); or to incorporate a range of more dialectically aesthetic features and lexis that may reflect the writer's background and/or ideological view of the Norwegian language. This allows for a sentence in Norwegian to be written in multiple combinations and variations. A writer of Bokmål can also make various choices: fram or frem ('forward'); stein or sten ('stone'); hentet or henta ('fetched'); en bok ('a book', common gender) or ei bok (feminine). None of this variation will come up in the exam but I feel it is important to incorporate it somehow, if only to prepare students. Should they travel to Norway or meet a Norwegian, they will come face to face with dialects they may have never heard before. If they travel in the west of Norway, they will read signage and news in Nynorsk with words I will not have had time to teach them. To a certain extent, this diversity and choice provide a Norwegian teacher with fantastic opportunities to explain linguistic structure and to incorporate short lessons on phonology and language history. I speak a dialect with diphthongs and words in feminine grammatical gender, and the freedom of choice in Bokmål allows me to both write and speak in that manner. Still, so-called 'standard language ideology' permeates much of teaching practices and this inevitably clashes with my experiences of teaching Norwegian. As an educator you are often expected to be an authority on correct spelling and the 'right' spoken register, accent and lexical choice. Indeed, as I coordinate my lessons and exams with colleagues who teach Swedish and Danish, choices must be made about what I am teaching, and therefore what I am not teaching, and how this can be in synchrony with students' expectations and the way we assess learning progress. These considerations involve a constant renegotiation between students' learning objectives and the need to reflect Norway's sociolinguistic reality. In a contemporary globalised setting, with emerging technology that has revolutionised the world of language education, to stress that a language is much more than a standard or prestige variety offers opportunities for more discussion about what language teaching is meant to achieve. My responsibility is not just to teach Norwegian – whatever 'Norwegian' that may be – but to incorporate positive attitudes towards a multidialectal, multistandard setting and, indeed, acceptance of it. Teachers of other languages with prestige varieties may have similar concerns where certain accents and dialects are consistently sidelined and stigmatised. Shouldn't we teach more than a single variety? If we prepare learners to live in new societies among new friends, isn't part of our duty to introduce them to all the ways a language is spoken and written? My time learning and teaching Norwegian has introduced various pedagogical challenges, but these issues will not be specific to Norwegian – a language with exceptional tolerance and acceptance of dialectal diversity. COMMUNITY SPIRIT A mountain village in Vågan, Nordland (left); and (below right) viewing the aurora borealis in Troms AN EXAMPLE OF DIALECTIC FREEDOM IMAGES © PEXELS

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