A Winning Dialect tells the story of linguistic and cultural change in rural Norway over the last two decades. Read the full Q&A about the book with the author Thea R. Strand.
Tell us about when the idea for writing this book first came to fruition. Is there a story behind it? How did this topic get fleshed out?
I was motivated to pursue research about the Valdres dialect in rural central Norway by a variety of things, piled up over many years. Starting from the beginning, my father is from Valdres, so I have family there and visited as a kid, which led me to feel a strong attachment to the place. I understood Norwegian well when I was young, but like a lot of heritage-language users, my knowledge was primarily of the spoken language and waned over time. In high school, I wanted to strengthen my language skills and learn to read Norwegian, so I signed up for a class. That turned out to be a truly strange experience, because, more than anything, I learned that the “Norwegian” I thought I knew was actually a very non-standard dialect. My awareness of and interest in the Valdres dialect grew from there, through college, where I discovered the subfield of linguistic anthropology and its relevance for understanding the language situation in Norway, and beyond when I lived in Valdres for a year after graduating. During that year, I worked at a rural elementary school, where I was able to hear and observe all sorts of interesting dialect use and linguistic commentary, and that led me to flesh out most of the book’s primary research questions over the next few years when I started graduate school. Since then, I have spent a lot of time in the classroom teaching undergraduates, and I think it is often difficult to find ethnographic texts that are both accessibly written and compelling for non-experts. So, I really wanted the book to fit into that niche and introduce students to a range of important concepts in linguistic anthropology, in addition to telling the particular story of the Valdres dialect over the last couple of decades.
Tell us about the research process for this book. What was it like to do academic research and fieldwork in Norway?
Doing my initial ethnographic fieldwork in Valdres, Norway, was exciting, challenging, and rewarding, all at once. Because I was already so familiar with the area, I was able to skip some of the usual getting-settled-in phase and use my existing connections to set up really productive interviews and opportunities for participant-observation early on. Valdres is a rural area that has until quite recently relied on family farming as its economic base, and during my early fieldwork, I worked on and off as a farmhand in dairy barns, milking cows early in the morning and again late in the afternoon, which allowed me to develop a deeper appreciation for that key part of life and culture in the local community. I think those experiences, along with the year working at an elementary school, were really important for being able to understand language and dialect in a broader, more holistic way.
What was the most challenging aspect of this project?
Being so familiar with the area from the outset was a clear advantage, but that familiarity and semi-insider status also brings its own challenges, particularly in that almost everyone I talked to for my research needed to be able to “place” me through our family networks and genealogies. Also, as a Valdres dialect speaker myself, it was easy to get people to talk about the dialect, especially their positive views of it, but it was sometimes difficult to elicit more critical, nuanced perspectives. This is because speaking a very non-standard dialect like Valdresmål can imply a whole mess of things in the context of Norwegian language politics. But in the end, it has been immensely rewarding to be able to share a lot of those language-political idiosyncrasies with a non-Norwegian audience and to do so through an ethnographic case study of a dialect and place that I am so deeply connected to.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading A Winning Dialect?
I imagine that most of my readers will be coming from places where “standard” language exists as an obvious thing, and they will be unfamiliar with the Norwegian sociolinguistic setting, which is so starkly different. So, I hope the book will open people’s eyes to the idea that “standard” language is always a politically constructed and rather arbitrary thing, and that linguistic diversity and especially dialect diversity can be genuinely appreciated. Non-normative regional dialects are legitimate and valuable ways of speaking that are often at the core of a community’s identity, and I think the example of Valdresmål is a compelling one for getting readers from other places to develop more critical awareness of linguistic differences in their own countries and communities, as well. More generally, as a text that is also partly intended to introduce key concepts and perspectives from linguistic anthropology, I hope it will encourage readers new to the subfield to pay closer attention to language in all its forms, because language and communication are so central to the human experience and how we position ourselves in relation to others in all of the various parts of our lives.
Read an excerpt of A Winning Dialect, here.
