Northern Norwegian, an introduction by Claus Torfinn - published on 21st

June 2019.

Northern Norwegian refers generally to the dialects spoken in the three northernmost
counties of Norway, Nordland, Troms and Finnmark.

The Finnmark and East Troms dialects are a slightly different situation as these areas
were only settled by Norwegian speakers in relatively recent times. Thus the Norwegian
spoken here blends typically Northern Norwegian traits with the southern dialects which
were brought here by incomers. In Finnmark the spoken language is close to the written
form Bokmål, as Finnmark was traditionally Sami and Kven speaking. The Uralic
phonology of these languages has in some way influenced the spoken-Bokmål
language, so that in Finnmark some speakers do not use aspirated sounds in initial k, p
and t.

Traditional Northern Norwegian, found in Nordland and most of Troms, is a unique

dialect group with roots back to the first Norse speaking settlers in this region,
historically known as Helgeland or Hålogaland.
The distribution of this dialect group is roughly consistent with the coastal settlement of
Old Norse speakers, so that Northern Norwegian is typically more 'West' Norwegian
than East Norwegian. This includes the preservation of diphthongs and the pronoun eg
for I.

Despite this, the region known as Hålogaland was historically quite separate from other
Norse-speaking districts, perhaps owing to the older inhabitants of this region who were
famous for their cave paintings and maritime culture. This early culture appears to have
been separate from the Sami cultures, and old Sami legends talk about the coming
together of two cultures in Northern Scandinavia in ancient times. (gamle historier fra
Helgeland - Arne Aronsen, pg 34).

Precisely what influence the language of these people or the Sami language had on
Northern Norwegian has not been researched yet. A folklorist from Troms, Inger
Johansson has examined and listed some of these early words.

The languages in Northern Scandinavia belong to three groups in two major families of
languages.

-North Germanic - includes the standard Norwegian and Swedish languages with a
localised pronunciation. We can further add to this the Northern Norwegian dialects,
particularly those of Helgeland and Salten districts, which are different enough from
spoken Norwegian Bokmål to be classed as 'Norwegian' in terms of the standard,
spoken Bokmål language.
Furthermore the Baltic is home to two other North-Germanic language or dialect groups
referred to as Eastern Bothnian in Finland and Westrobothnian in Sweden.
Westrobothnian is now being more accepted as a language in its own right, and even
within the different dialects of Westrobothnian, mutual intelligibility can be low, meaning
that Westrobothnian may in fact be several, closely related languages.

-Sami - the Sami languages are the older, indigenous Uralic languages in Northern
Europe. They were once spoken across most of mainland Scandinavia, including the
South of Finland and the South of Norway. Their precise relationship with the Finno-
Baltic languages is hotly disputed, although sometimes the most common nouns and
verbs are very similar in both language groups. On the other hand, Sami languages are
very different to Finno-Baltic, their system of consonant graduation has more variables,
they have dual number in pronouns and verbs, but they lack the number of suffixes or
"noun cases" found in Finno-Baltic. This has lead some to suggest that Sami languages
can be closer to Indo-European in some respects.
The Sami languages spoken in Northern Scandinavia include the Pite, Lule, Northern,
Inari and Skolt Sami languages. Others are spoken to the South and to the east in
Russia. Historically there were also two other Sami languages spoken in Finland

-Finno-Baltic - this is another family of Uralic languages which includes Finnish,

Estonian and Karelian. The original homeland of these languages seems to have been
around St. Petersberg in Russia where the greatest variety of Finno-Baltic languages is
seen.
Finnish also has many dialects, including the differing Savonian dialects in the East of
the country and the Peräpohjola dialects in the North of Finland, which stretch beyond
the boundaries of Finland to form the Meänkieli language in Northern Sweden, and the
Kven language in Troms and Finnmark. Although the Kvens and Meänkieli speakers are
usually considered to be recent immigrants to these parts, Kven people themselves
state that the Finnish language has been here for much longer, some records pointing
to the presence of Finns in these regions from at least a thousand years ago. (On the
Kvens of Troms, Geir Oscarsson).

- Typical Northern Norwegian traits

- The dialect of Nesna in Helgeland
- The dialects of Salten in Nordland
- Some etymologies with Sami or other origins
Typical Northern Norwegian traits

Northern Norwegian dialects are typically defined by their apocope, falling pitch accent
across a sentence, and palatalisation. None of these things are in themselves unique to
Northern Norwegian, the dialects in Trøndelag to the south share many of these
features in their language, but they are not Northern Norwegian.

Northern Norwegian begins at the southern point of Nordland, where the dialects here
are sometimes classed as Trøndersk dialects. Dialects in Helgeland do not necessarily
have apocope, in some areas verb infinitives end with -æ, e.g veræ, etæ.
The apocope means that, to different degrees the final vowel is dropped. This occurs
commonly in verbs

å være/vera becomes å vær/ver

å kaste becomes å kast
å tenke becomes å tænk
å kjøre becomes å kjør

The vowel in these verbs often takes a special circumflex tone that is found in some
parts of Scandinavia. Apocope also occurs elsewhere.

husan - husene - the houses

fjellan - fjellene - the mountains
skogan - skogene - the forests

The degree of apocope depends upon the individual dialect, and in areas where it is
common, it depends upon how rural the dialect is and how much an individual's speech
has been influenced by spoken Bokmål. It is common in the urban dialects of Northern
Norway to hear people use apocope only in certain parts of a sentence depending upon
emphasis.

The pitch accent in Northern Norwegian tends to decrease in tone along a sentence.
This is also found in Western Norway, but not in Eastern Norway including the Oslo
dialect where the tone rises along the sentence. Rural and traditional dialects also use
the circumflex tone on words which have apocope, often written with a circumflex
accent, so 'to be' normally å være can be written å væ̂r, kunne can be written kûnnj.

Palatalisation is common in Northern Norwegian, as well as in Trøndersk and in

Western Norwegian. Where palatalisation occurs can be localised from one dialect to
another.
mannj - mann - man
lannj - land - land
dennj - den - it

Palatalisation sometimes only occurs for certain consonants like n and l, but it is also
common for many consonants to have palatal of "slender" forms, often occurring in
sequence. The Salten dialects for instance commonly palatalise d and t, similarly to the
soft sounds in Russian or the slender consonants in Irish.

Various changes to vowels happen in Northern Norwegian, which is again localised and
dependent upon an individual region. Perhaps most common are the changes from e
and i to æ and e.

å tænk - å tenke - to think

vænn - venn - friend
å læs - å lese - to read
sæng - seng - bed
omkreng - omkring - around
tell - til - to
fesk - fisk - fish
venn' - vinden - the wind

Interrogative pronouns in Northern Norwegian are similar to those in West Norwegian.

This involves a change from older hv to k, where spoken Bokmål has v. Others believe
that the k pronunciation is preserved from the original Indo-European.

ka, ke - hva - what

kor - hvor - where
kem, kæm - hvem - who
koffør, koffår - hvorfor - why
katti - når - when
kordan - hvordan - how

The personal pronouns of Northern Norwegian are typically similar to those of West
Norwegian, but in some parts, particularly Northern Nordland and Troms there is a
tendency to have æ, mæ, dæ as standard, instead of eg, meg, deg.

æ, æg, e, eg - jeg/eg - I
du - du - you
hannj, hanj, hån - han - he
ho, hu - hun/ho - she
det, dæ - det - it
vi - vi/me - we
dokker, dåkker, dåkke, dogger - dere - plural you
di, dem, dæm - de - they

Examples

Æ ha læst bøkan
Jeg har lest bøkene
I have read the books

Hannj e ikkje min vænn

Han er ikke min venn
He is not my friend

Ka sa dem?
Hva sa de?
What did they say?

Ska dem reis tell Finlannj?

Skal de reise til Finland?
Will they travel to Finland?

Ka heit du?
Hva heter du?
What is your name?

Note: In Northern Norwegian the soft k and kj sound in spoken Bokmål is more
commonly replaced by a sound that can be similar or identical to the English "ch" in
"chin".

Note: the diphthong ei in Northern Norwegian is typically pronounced as written and is

not the æi sound found in spoken Bokmål, where jeg reiser is pronounced as though
jæi ræiser.

The Nesna Dialect

The dialect of Nesna in Helgeland has been extensively documented in the book Ord
fra gamle Nesna by Torstein Sørensen. The dialects of Helgeland can often by quite
different to the standard spoken Bokmål and Nynorsk Norwegian languages, I therefore
consider Northern Norwegian to be a separate North-Germanic or Norwegian language.

The Nesna dialect sometimes lacks the long a to å change that is typical in Norwegian,
the sound is also preserved as a in the Luleå dialects of Westrobothnian.

ga - gå - go
lae - låve - barn
bannj - bånd - band

Voiceless stops frequently become voiced in intervocalic or final positioning.

iddje, ittje, tje - ikke - not

seddan - sittende - sitting
brugg - bruke - use

In some places the pronoun jeg/eg is preserved as the Old Norse form ek, e.g. Ek e
iddje - jeg er ikke/eg er ikkje - I am not.

There are other vowel changes that occur in the Nesna dialects, such as slæpp for
slippe, ø can sometimes become y as in:

sjy - sjø - sea

sny - snø - snow

Sometimes the opposite is true in words such as

sjøt - skyte - shoot

skøL - skylle - pour or wash

The dialect of Salten

The Salten dialect is the larger dialect group or 'language' around the Saltfjorden in
Nordland, this lies north of the Saltfjellet mountain range, which isolates the Salten
dialect from the Helgeland dialects. The Salten dialect also includes the urban dialects
of Fauske and Bodø, the Bodø dialect being more influenced by regional Northern
Norwegian, so that the first person singular pronoun is æ instead of e, and ikkje is used
instead of ikkj.

The Salten dialect features extensive apocope which can extend to a wider variety of
words than in other Northern Norwegian dialects, such as the use of ikkj for ikke/ikkje
and mang for mange. The definite forms of neuter gendered nouns also undergo
apocope, so that huset, fjellet, landet become hus, fjell, lannj. Here the second tone,
tonem 2 is used on the long vowel with apocope.

Unlike in other Norwegian dialects 'he' can be hån in Salten, and also in a few other
places in Nordland. The same exists in some dialects of the Westrobothnian languages.
The pronouns are as follows.

é - jeg
du - du
hån - han
ho - hun
da - det

é e ikkj mannj så du såg mæ jakken på

Jeg er ikke mannen som du så med jakken på
I am not the man who you saw with the jacket on

The final -m can disappear, e.g. så for som and jøno for gjennom.

Ancient etymologies of Northern Norwegian

Inger Johansson, a Sami from Mo-i-Rana, has been researching the early Lofoten and
Helgeland people, and will release more information later in 2019. These ancient
seafarers left an archaeological legacy in the form of cave art, such as those at
Refsvikshula and Trenyken in Lofoten, a cave painting culture which later spread down
Helgeland. The name Trenyken itself means "three hills", the word being knuk, which is
actually a Gaelic word or a pre-Gaelic word. Place-names beginning with Bal in Western
Norway tend to occur in areas where mining was practiced, e.g Ballangen, and Ballstad
near 'Gravdal' (mine, or grave valley). The meaning isn't known but may be compared to
bal in the Cornish language, 'mine', or an alternative etymology linked to Norwegian
poll, a saltwater lake joined to the sea by a narrow channel.
Her research indicates that the Sami languages and Northern Norwegian dialects can
be used to trace the origins of these people back to the early Uralic and Atlantic Ocean
sailors. The two words from the Nesna dialect below demonstrate how a substratum
seems to exist between Uralic, Germanic and Afro-Asiatic languages. In the word fLakk,
we can see how the consonants F-L-K are represented as H(A)LAK and FAL in Afro-
Asiatic, and as LAK or W(A)LAK in Northern Europe. For Afro-Asiatic languages the
combination FLK may have been difficult to pronounce, where we have interchanges
between F and H, also found in Gaelic, such is the interchange between W and F found
in Celtic.

fLakk - to travel around, traceable to Proto-Atlantic hlak, to go or to drive or fal - to go,

Proto-Uralic jakka - to go, Finnish lähte - to go away, and valka - to go down, English
walk.

bræms - insect, traceable to Proto-Atlantic bar or ramm a type of insect, Sami orbmes,
Finnish virma, Norwegian orm.

Acknowledgements

. Ord fra gamle Nesna, Torstein Sørensen

. Dialekter i Helgeland og Salten, Dorotea Marum