Re: Of accents & dialects

Den 21. okt. 2008 kl. 16.30 skreiv Benct Philip Jonsson:
>
> I don't know if the situation
> in Norway is markedly different, although my
> hunch is that the slogan "speak dialect, write
> Nynorsk" if anything makes the situation even
> more confused; can a Southeasterner who writes
> and mostly reads only Bokmål tell the difference
> between someone speaking a Western or Northern
> traditional dialect and someone from those areas
> speaking standard Nynorsk?
With northern it's very easy, but with the western ones you may have
to listen a while to decide.

I realise that dialects in Norway are stronger than in most western
countries. Even in the southeast they are so strong that it's
possible to fight against standardisation. It's not going well, but
at least I'm doing my bit.

Even here, the viable dialects are influenced by the standard
language, and traditional forms are being dropped by the dozens.
Still I think the concept of the difference between a dialect and the
standard language spoken with a regional accent is a little
confusing. If a dialect loses all its distinct morphology, but keeps
its phonology, will linguists stop calling it a dialect and begin to
refer to it as a regional accent only? How much of the morphology
needs to remain for the dialect to remain a dialect? And to what
extent can you really separate morphology from phonology for this
classification?

LEF

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