Learning the Lingo

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, and I know I should be more on the ball, telling you people about my adventures. About two weeks ago, my students (about 70 of them) turned in their first papers for my Composition 110 class. I graded them all in about a week and a half to the surprise of my colleagues, since it normally takes longer for Composition teachers to get through a round of papers. It was a lot of late nights in the office, and by the time I was done, I really didn’t feel like sitting down and posting a blog.

Last night, the ACN staff had a Thursday get-together, like an end-of-the-week dinner to kind of decompress and de-stress from the week. As we were talking, we started talking about languages and how each of us sitting around the table knew different languages. That’s something you really don’t see in the United States, a table full of language-speakers (and no, not the languages offered in high schools like German, Spanish, or French).

My boss is American, but she studied in Norway during college, so she picked up Norwegian and is now fluent in it. Another person at the table was raised in Holland, but he attended American schools there, so he speaks English like anyone off the street; however, he also knows a little Dutch, I think he said, and he also speaks Norwegian pretty well. I took four years of German in high school, then another two semesters in college; I also took three semesters of Norwegian at UND and tested out of the four Norwegian class I was required to take. Of all the people at the table, one colleague didn’t speak Norwegian at all, but he really surprised me when he pulled out his reading glasses in an Indian restaurant and started reading the inscriptions that were painted along the walls.

I guess I never realized how multicultural Europe was until I got here. I mean, I did have some inkling as to the diversity of the place, being there are so many countries, so many cultures, and so many languages all jammed together in one place—it’s something you learn in school, but you really need to experience firsthand.

I’ve been speaking Norwegian to some of my students at the beginning of class and in the hallways here and there. It seems very challenging but very rewarding to speak with students more than anyone walking down the street. First off, I already know the students, and through their papers, I get to know more about them, so it’s very comfortable talking with them. It’s pretty daunting, however, because when I speak Norwegian to them before class and say something as I’ve always said it, they laugh. I asked if my pronunciation was wrong, or if I was inflecting the wrong parts of certain words, but they replied, “No…we just don’t expect it from you. It’s always surprising when it comes from you, because we know you’re American.”

Whenever I speak with students in Norwegian, they’re always very excited to teach me new vocabulary (but I’m surprised that they haven’t gone straight for the bad words). Every conversation in Norwegian ends up with me asking about linguistics questions (“So the –st ending on vennlig makes it an adverbial?”)—and then our conversations boil down to different dialects of Norwegian language.

Norwegian has a slew of different dialects, and the problem with them is that two people with different dialects can both be speaking Norwegian and not understand each other. We have a few people from Bergen, a larger city on the western side of the country, and people from around this area near Oslo can hardly understand them because of their dialect. Because there’s such a long coastline here, you could almost imagine that every little fjord along Norway’s coast could possibly have its own specific dialect—and people have claimed that by studying Norwegian dialects, we could actually pinpoint where in Norway a person originated. I’m sure there are linguists that study that with English, as well, though I don’t know the real term for it, but in all, I think it’s really interesting.