Two's company for Norse

   The Phonology of Norwegian By Gjert Kristoffersen Oxford University Press 366pp, Pounds 60.00 ISBN 0 19 823765 0 w THES Bookshop Pounds 58.00Tel: 020 8324 5104

The linguistic situation in Norway is special compared with other European countries because there are two competing language norms. These are called Bokmål ("book language") and Nynorsk ("new Norwegian"). The origin of this distinction lies in political and social tensions in the 19th century. An independent kingdom until the late medieval period, Norway gradually became a province of Denmark. In 1814, however, the country declared itself an independent monarchy and was re-established as a nation, becoming independent in 1905.

The written language used by the educated classes before this time was Danish, but nationalism soon gave rise to protest over introducing a Norwegian language. There were two schools of thought on this matter: reformists, who thought that Danish orthography should be modified to suit Norwegian needs, and nationalists, who were eager to minimise Danish influence. In the end, two norms were established.

Nynorsk was construed by the genial scholar Ivar Aasen around the middle of the 19th century, based partly on his research into rural dialects, and partly on Old Norse. The main proponent of the reform strategy was the prolific Knud Knudsen, who sought to retain a form of Norwegian that would be intelligible to Norwegians and to their neighbours in Sweden and Denmark. In its most common variety, Bokmål t oday reflects formal middle-class urban speech and enjoys the status of unofficial standard Norwegian.

It is against this historical and sociolinguistic background, manifested in complex relations between the two norms, that one must evaluate Gjert Kristoffersen's pioneering analysis of Norwegian phonology. Cast in the framework of generative phonology, its main purpose is to present data and analysis of the phonological system of the variety of Norwegian spoken in the southeastern region surrounding Oslo. The author has chosen lexical phonology as the theoretical backbone of the book, rather than optimality theory, which is the dominant approach. This is justified given that the work does not primarily target front-line phonologists, keen on the latest theoretical developments, but rather linguistics students, for whom the discussion should be accessible. The book is an ideal reference source in lexical phonology for students in advanced phonology courses and professional linguists.

The book offers a comprehensive account of the phonetic and phonological properties of Norwegian. Although Norwegian is perhaps not as exotic as the closely related Icelandic (which boasts pre-aspirated sounds and complicated umlaut phenomena), its phonology exhibits some remarkable characteristics. There are two topics phonologists have long concentrated on. These are the tonal accents, found in most of the dialects, and the retroflex segments in varieties spoken in eastern and northern Norway. As in Swedish, Norwegian can distinguish two forms minimally by means of different pitch contours. The first author to write about these was Aasen himself as early as 1864, and the topic has since attracted much attention. The retroflex segments, for their part, created lively discussion among structuralist and early generative linguists. In addition to offering thorough and judicious analyses of these phenomena, Kristoffersen discusses more neglected areas, such as stress placement across native and non-native words, voicing assimilations and vowel-shortening processes. Because a comprehensive range of data in many cases is not available, the analyses of these matters are necessarily tentative.

Much remains to be done but this book serves as the starting point for further work on Norwegian phonology.

Thórhallur Eythórsson is research fellow in linguistics, University of Manchester.