[...]... resulted in the establishment of Norsk Språkråd (The Norwegian Language Council) in 1972, where both camps are represented The main task of the Council is to further the development of the norms, but the explicit goal of creating one norm seems on the whole to have been abandoned, at least for the time being 1.3 A LANGUAGE WITHOUT AN OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZED SPOKEN NORM While the actual pronunciation of Norwegian. .. introduction 1.4 THE SYSTEM TO BE DESCRIBED IN THIS BOOK It is often taken for granted that a description of the phonology of a given language will be a description of the spoken standard variety of that language, which the author very often can claim to speak himself Due to the situation outlined above, writing an account of Norwegian phonology is somewhat more complicated Earlier accounts of Norwegian phonology. .. especially from Denmark, but in the merchant class also from other North-European countries In addition, the only university in the kingdom was in Copenhagen, so all priests, whether they were of Norwegian or Danish stock, had to spend several of their formative years in Denmark to receive their education there The variety spoken by the educated classes during the final half of the nineteenth century we may... convenience call Dano -Norwegian (DN) DN diverged from the standard spoken Danish of the time in that it lacks the most salient sound change that Danish underwent during the middle ages, the radical consonant 18 I myself do not speak Standard Østnorsk, but the accent of my home town on the Southern coast modified after 25 years of living in other parts of the country My speech can all the same be seen as... was controversial among some groups The dialects therefore presented themselves as a viable alternative, strengthened by the fact that they gradually came to be looked upon as direct descendants of Old Norse, the language of the former period of independence which had also witnessed a rich literary culture The two views soon came to oppose each other Adherents of the national option proposed that a... styles The lexical distribution of the retroflex flap is for example not given (see Chapter 4.3.3), although it is stated in the preface that there are words where the flap must be considered standard 20 But there will all the same be many Norwegian varieties that are left out The reader is therefore warned that most Norwegian scholars would look on the present book as one falling far short of what the title... [²so lə] The glides were produced as part of the diphthongs [æj] and [æw], also inserted in the frame l_n The mean duration for the long vowels was 251 ms., and that of the short vowels 133 ms The formant values were extracted by means of LPC-analysis on a KAY Computerized Speech Lab at around the middle point of the vowel span 16 segments: inventory and feature specifications (2) Formant values of high... representatives from the independent farming class The constitution, which was signed on May 17th 1814, declared Norway an independent monarchy, and thereby opposed the Kiel treaty In the ensuing negotiations between the Norwegian parliament and the Swedish king, the king acknowledged the constitution with some amendments, and the result was a so-called personal union of the two countries under the Swedish... pronunciation of Norwegian has played a fundamental role in the development of both norms, the existence of two competing written norms has on the other hand prevented the formation of an uncontroversial spoken norm There is in other words no officially sanctioned way of speaking Norwegian Norsk Språkråd (see above), whose main function is to develop and maintain the written norms, should normally not occupy itself... language used by the educated classes before 1814 was Danish, and the continued use of Danish after 1814 was one of the many ways of expressing and securing the relative independence from Sweden 5 A good introduction to the history of the Scandinavian languages, and thereby to the interrelationship between them, is Haugen (1976) An introduction to the sociolinguistic situation in Norway and in Scandinavia . Durand The Phonology of Danish The Phonology of Dutch Geert Booij The Phonology of Standard Chinese San Duanmu The Phonology of Polish Edmund Gussman The Phonology of English Michael Hammond The Phonology. 2000 PREFACE The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the phonology of the variety of Norwegian spoken by the majority of the inhabitants of the most densely populated area of Norway,. Faroese Kristján Árnason The Phonology of Tamil Prathima Christdas The Phonology of Italian Martin Krämer The Phonology of Spanish Iggy Roca Hans Basb ll ø ´ 1 THE PHONOLOGY OF NORWEGIAN Gjert Kristoffersen 3 Great