Dialects Converging: Rural Speech in Urban Norway (UK HB 1st)

Kerswill, Paul

ISBN 10: 0198248261 / ISBN 13: 9780198248262

Published by Oxford University Press - OUP - Clarendon Press, 1995

About this Item

UK hardback first impression. VG in Good jacket with some fade to spine and edges.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1532451508343

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dialects Converging: Rural Speech in Urban Norway (UK HB 1st)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press - OUP - Clarendon Press
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198248261
• ISBN 13: 9780198248262
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Recent models of dialect contact, notably in the work of Trudgill, Chambers, James Milroy, and Labov have stressed the importance of the notions of salience, simplification, linguistic complexity, and the speech community in accounting for the patterns that arise. In this case-study of the speech of rural migrants in the Norwegian city of Bergen, Paul Kerswill critically examines the usefulness of these concepts, and puts recent models of dialect contact to the test for the first time against a case of such contact as it is actually happening.

Dialect contact often, it is said, leads to Koineization - the emergence of new, mixed varieties of a language resulting from the intermingling of speakers of different varieties of that language. Kerswill investigates the extent to which processes of change typically ascribed to Koineization are already prefigured in the speech of the first-generation adult migrants of this study.

While the author's approach is broadly quantitative he also demonstrates the importance of ethnographic and social-psychological explanations in accounting for the wide differences between individuals in the study. He argues for a sociolinguistic methodology founded on a richer and more comprehensive view of the social factors influencing, langague use.

About the Author

Paul Kerswill is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading.