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Codeswitching in Hemnesberget — Myth or reality?
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Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 749-761
Codeswitching in Hemnesberget - Myth or reality? Brit M~ehlum Department of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Trondheim. N-7055 Dragvoll, Norway
ReceivedDecember1994; revisedversionFebruary 1995 Abstract In this article I will discuss the main hypotheses in J.-P. Blom and J.J. Gumperz' (1972) classical and pivotal study 'Social meaning in linguistic structures: Codeswitching in Norway'. The research of Blom and Gumperz was carried out in the village of Hemnes in Northern Norway, and the focus of the study is the internal relationship between Ranamdl, i.e. the local dialect, and Bokmdl, i.e. a standardized national spoken variety. According to Blom and Gumperz these two varieties play equivalent roles in the verbal repertoire of the Hemnes population, they are kept completely separate by the speakers and represent as such the main components in discrete codeswitching strategies in this community. My primary intention, then, is to demonstrate that Blom and Gumperz have given a portrayal of a situation that can not be comprehensive of any real-life Norwegian community. I will try to show that their assumptions are based on unjustifiable and unsatisfactory premises, both with respect to certain theoretical as well as methodological principles.
1. Introduction The research carried out by J.-P. Blom and J.J. Gumperz (1972) in the village of Hemnes in Northem Norway has received close attention in a series of papers and reviews dealing with various forms of linguistic codeswitching. And first and foremost it has been referred to within the field of theory building connected to codeswitching phenomena (see, for example, recent works such as Appel and Muysken, 1987: 29; Bartsch, 1987: 105; Gal, 1988; Heller, 1988; Hudson, 1980: 56; Milroy, 1987a: 64ff., Milroy, 1987b: 17-18, 31ff.; Poplack, 1988; Romaine, 1989: 259; Scotton, 1988; Wardhaugh, 1990: 105). As a result, this research has come to play a pivotal role in theoretical interactional sociolinguistics, and is also widely regarded as being a good representative of Gumperz' many other anthropological-linguistic studies. Furthermore, very little attention has been paid to specificially * The article has been translated from Norwegian by Jean Hannah and Peter Trudgill. 0378-2166/96/$15.00 © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(95)00027-5
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Norwegian linguistic conditions in the international sociolinguistic literature, and because of the status that has been afforded this classic Hemnes investigation, it is probable that its findings will be generalized from and come to be regarded as typical of all small Norwegian communities. Given this extensive international interest, it is surprising that Blom and Gumperz' study has attracted so little comment or debate from Norwegian linguists, and that no comparable follow-up studies have been undertaken anywhere else in Norway which could shed further light on the Hemnes findings. One of the few linguists who has produced an explicitly negative critique of Blom and Gumperz' work is Kjell Venhs who, in his introductory sociolinguistics book Mdl og MiljO (1982), is very critical of several of the central theses of the Hemnes study (see also Bull, 1986: 79, for similarly critical comments): "One cannot help but be somewhat surprised at a number of the things that Blom and Gumperz say, nor help doubting, at least up to a point, whether they have given a comprehensive portrayal of the linguistic situation in Hemnesberget. 1...] It is not known for anyone to leap from pure dialect to pure standard speech in this way in any other INorwegian] rural community, and this cannot be correct for Hemnesberget either. On the contrary, the usual thing is for speakers to demonstrate many intermediate stages between the one linguistic pole and the other." (Ven~s, 1982: 78, my translation)
One of the fundamental premises of Blom and Gumperz' work lies in the assumption that both Ranamdl (i.e. the local dialect) and Bokmdl ~ (a standardized national spoken variety) play equivalent roles in the verbal repertoire of the Hemnes population. According to Blom and Gumperz, these two varieties constitute between them the community's full linguisti c range, and thus comprise the sum total of means of verbal communication that are available for social interaction. Another assumption which is fundamental to their overall view is that the two varieties are kept completely separate by speakers; the choice between them is conditioned by certain socio-semantic structures, and these constraints produce a sharp differentiation between the varieties from one social context to another. The local dialect and the normalized speech variety thus, according to Blom and Gumperz, participate in a process of discrete codeswitching in this community. Gumperz in later works (1982) has employed the term 'discourse strategy' to characterize codeswitching as an interactional principle. His use of this term depends on the assumption that speech can signal distinct social and cultural values in interpersonal relations. In other words, verbal behaviour is of particular social significance, and can thus be used to project certain aspects of our socio-cultural identity. From this point of view, linguistic behaviour is to be regarded as a series of 'acts of identity' (see.Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) - an expression of the negotiation of the participants' personal identities and their search for particular social roles (see also, for example, Scotton, 1980 and 1983). It is within an interactional-theoretical framework of this type that Blom and Gumperz set up an This is Blom and Gumperz' terminology. In what follows, I will, however, prefer terms such as 'normalized' or 'standardized variety' or better '(spoken) standard' to refer to this variety. Bokmdl is actually a term which designates an officially-coded written norm, and it should therefore not, without further specification, be applied to any variety of spoken Norwegian.
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opposition between dialect and standard speech in Hemnes to represent a contrast between local and national values respectively. This originally regional opposition is also, however, closely bound up with distinct status differences, such that the standard variety mainly connotes prestige, power, and authority, while the dialect is a marker of specific local identity and loyality - an asymmetric relationship that Bourdieu (1977) calls a 'symbolic domination'. The individual speaker's choice of code is also limited and controlled by a complex of contextual factors, such as topic, interlocutor, and the objectives of the interaction, all of which contribute to the selection of one of the two varieties. Obviously, the major points of Blom and Gumperz' study have made a highly important contribution to interactional sociolinguistics. The question is, however, whether their model can legitimately be applied to the actual linguistic reality that they encountered in the Norwegian community of Hemnes. There are many indications that, given their experience from work elsewhere in totally different socio-cultural and linguistic conditions, Blom and Gumperz have taken sociolinguistic structures that they know to be present in these other societies and then, as it were, projected an outline of these structures onto a Norwegian social reality. It is, surely, significant that immediate intuitive reactions to this work by Norwegians, linguists and non-linguists alike, consist of a complete lack of recognition of, and thus strong scepticism about, the results. These objections and criticisms concern many of Blom and Gumperz' most basic assertions about linguistic strategies in Hemnes, and suggest very strongly that the picture painted by Blom and Gumperz quite simply does not tally with the actual linguistic situation that we find in Norway. Moreover, even though I am not personally familiar with the Hemnes locality investigated by Blom and Gumperz, it is possible to point to several other indications that this scepticism about their findings is well-grounded. In the following, I will therefore attempt to amplify and give more specific examples of some of these criticisms of the Hemnes study, and thus help to clarify why it is that, as Ven~s says, we "[...] cannot help but be somewhat surprised at a number of the things that Blom and Gumperz say". 2. Hemnes - An atypical Norwegian community? To begin with, I must concede that it is of course not an entirely satisfactory scientific procedure to assert that, simply because the principles of linguistic switching that have been described for Hemnes have not been documented anywhere else in Norway, they cannot a priori be correct. It is, theoretically speaking, possible that very unusual social conditions may exist in this north Norwegian village which could help to explain these highly, I will maintain, un-Norwegian verbal strategies. 2 However, from the description that Blom and Gumperz give of the socio-cultural 2 By un-Norwegian I mean: hitherto not found or described elsewhere in Norway. In other words, Blom and Gumperz' model is based on a verbal principle which probably nobody will be familiar with within the Norwegian speech community-- with the exception of some individual speakers who have grown up under quite special dialectconditions(see below).
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conditions found in this small community, it would seem to be the case that there is nothing which could in any logical way explain the switching patterns which they claim to have observed. On the contrary, they describe a rather conventional Norwegian rural community, with social values and structures that do not in any way diverge from the general Norwegian cultural pattern. The social structure is relatively egalitarian, without any marked or formalized social hierarchy of the type that exists in, for example, several of the cultural areas where Gumperz has carried out some of his other linguistic studies (for example, Gumperz, 1964). One of the main tenets of Blom and Gumperz' theory is that there is an intimate relationship between the socio-ecological system and verbal behaviour; therefore, some of my criticisms must be directed precisely at those conditions which relate to this basic thesis. My contention here is that there are in fact no factors in the socio-cultural environments in Hemnes which could in any way be expected to cause such a distinct - and thus very un-Norwegian -altemation between dialect and standard. Before I give a more general evaluation of the relationship between dialect and standard in Norway, it may be helpful to call attention to a special category of speakers who we might consider to be likely to exhibit switching patterns of the type described by Blom and Gumperz. Within the socially heterogeneous ranks of speakers of Norwegian who have in some way or another been geographically mobile, I know from experience that there are certain individuals who are able to alternate in a more or less clearcut manner between different varieties, whether it is a question of switching between dialect and spoken standard, or of an alternation between two different dialects. Unfortunately, there have so far been few investigations in Norway of the language used by mobile speakers of this type, and it is therefore difficult to give a detailed description of the nature and extent of this kind of switching. There are, however, many indications that bidialectism of this type is primarily a strategy that is associated with children who have grown up in, or moved to, a speech community where their parents' dialect(s) deviates from the language of the majority of the other people around them. As far as mobile adults are concerned, on the other hand, there are at least two Norwegian studies which demonstrate clearly that moving from one area to another does not necessarily result in individual codeswitching strategies that involve clear differentiation between the relevant varieties. In these two studies (Rekdal, 1971, and M~ehlum, 1986), which both deal with rural dialect speakers living in the capital of Norway, Oslo, it has been shown that, on the contrary, features from both the original dialect and the spoken standard are to be found in individuals' speech simultaneously. In other words, their speech is characterized by varying degrees of interference at different linguistic levels. It is thus possible to point to a more or less marked substratum effect from the original dialect in the speech of every single informant. The discrete context-conditioned switching between dialect and standard which is claimed to be the predominant form of variation in Hemnes, occurs in my material (Maehlum, 1986), for example, only to a very particular and highly limited extent. In spite of the fact that the two conversational contexts set up for my study mainly symbolized values associated with standard speech and dialect respectively, only two of the four informants were keeping dialect and standard variants apart
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between one context and the other, and then only for one variable out of a total of eleven. Otherwise, the speech of these informants is characterized by a mixture of dialect and standard forms in the same social context; a mixture that also appears within one sentence, and even within the boundaries of one and the same lexical unit. Context-conditioned variation does, however, occur, but is manifested for the most part as a matter of degree, with relative proportions of dialect and standard variants changing from context to context, with marked individual differences. Possibly John Gibbons' (1987) concept of 'code swaying' can be used to refer to relative readjustments, or gradual transitions, of this kind in an individual, more or less constant hybrid repertoire. At the same time, certain individual variables appear to be capable of having a more outstanding signalizing function as dialect or standard indicators (see, for example, Thelander, 1979 II: 53), and in these particular cases one thus does find a clearer differentiation between the two social contexts in my material. Relative situations of this sort, with continuum-like transitions between 'pure' dialect and 'pure' standard, are apparently characteristic of the Norwegian linguistic situation generally. Individual context-conditioned switching strategies most often take the form of movement between two idealized extremes, but nearly always in such a way that speech becomes more or less standardized, or more or less markedly dialectal. The last years, however, there has been some focussing on the so-called 'regional standards', which are a kind of standard varieties developed on a clear dialectal substratum. But each of these quite recently developed varieties is in fact not a homogeneous and stable entity, but rather a complex, variable and diffuse synthesis of dialectal and standard features (see, for example, Bandle, 1982: 44-46, with references to several Norwegian studies). In any case, for a large proportion of dialect-speaking Norwegians, approximation to the standard occurs only through the modification of single words and grammatical forms or of particular idiomatic expressions. In addition, certain other individual speakers are able to carry out structural, and very often also systematic, changes of the original dialect at, for example, the phonological and morphological levels. In my opinion, however, the crucial point here is that dialect and standard should be regarded primarily as idealized entities: it is their existence as norms which is important)
3. Standard spoken language in Norway The postulate of Ranamdl and Bokm~l as equivalent linguistic structures in the Hemnes community's verbal repertoire is, as we saw above, fundamental to Blom and Gumperz' study. They refer to these two varieties collectively as "the totality 3 Severalindicators suggest rather clearly that Blom and Gumperz have an idealized view of dialects that to a considerable extent tallies with what is more or less implicit in traditional dialectology. Each language system is regarded as a completely homogeneous and static entity, in which any elements from, for example, standardized speech are regarded as structural deviations from the 'genuine', 'original' and 'pure' dialect. Sociolectal variation within a dialectologically-defined area can, thus, hardly be reconciled with a theoretical construct of this type.
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of linguistic resources which speakers may employ in social interaction" (p. 411), and make no attempt to set up any typological distinction between them. It is true, however, that they do point out that there is a difference in the acquisition of the two varieties, designating the dialect as 'the mother tongue', and describing Bokmdl as the official language of formal education. But Blom and Gumperz also note that schooling is obligatory in Norway, and then, without any reservation, come to the conclusion that "[...] allowing for certain individual differences in fluency, all speakers of Ranamdl also control the standard" (p. 411, my emphasis). They thus take for granted that these two varieties are equally well established in the community. The internal relationship between them is, furthermore, portrayed almost as a diglossic one - a characterisation which, on any definition of diglossia, cannot be said to be an accurate portrayal of the linguistic situation in Norway. By equating dialect and standard in this way, Blom and Gumperz completely disregard certain crucial aspects of normal linguistic socialization. Therefore, they also ignore the different positions the two varieties have within individual language competence. In the first place, it is essential to stress that there are vital and very basic differences between the acquisition processes associated with a speaker's original dialect and those associated with a supraregional spoken standard, at least in terms of the typical Norwegian language scene. 4 Dialects are normally acquired through primary socialization in a given, geographically delimited community, and here it is the intimate social network with mainly parents, siblings and friends who function as linguistic models. In this kind of dialectal environment, standardized speech is usually a linguistic variety that children are primarily exposed to via the audio-visual mass media, and later on also when they learn to read and write at school. However, no codified spoken standard of such a language variety exists in Norway, and there is therefore no formalized training in its use (unlike, say, the situation in Sweden and Denmark). On the contrary, any use of the spoken standard as the normal language of education in schools, such as Blom and Gumperz describe for Hemnes, represents a clear violation of official Norwegian regulations (see, for example, Jahr, 1984). According to the Odelsting ('Lower House Legislature') Resolution of 1878 (and § 40.1 of the current Elementary School Law), pupils have an absolute right to use their own dialect in lessons, and, although clear breaches of this rule have certainly been reported in a number of cases, the teacher must even take pupils' colloquial language into account as far as it is possible. Formal competence in the use of the standard language in Norway therefore for the most part consists of the ability to express oneself in this variety only in writing. Almost inevitably, of course, schools do to an extent help to promote a certain standardization of the spoken language as well, but insofar as this occurs, it is a standardization of speech that is based overwhelmingly on the acquisition of the formal written language.
4 TO define precisely - for my purpose here, I leave out of account those individuals who have a standard language as their mother tongue.
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A speech variety that is acquired in this more or less indirect way, through schools as official socialization agencies, is very unlikely to be internalized in the individual language user in the same way as the primary, localized dialect. The question therefore arises as to what extent such a secondarily acquired speech variety can be integrated into an individual's active verbal repertoire. The formal requirement in Norwegian schools extends only to passive competence. Unfortunately Blom and Gumperz make no attempt to differentiate between active and passive components of a linguistic repertoire. On the contrary, they actually maintain that, from a linguistic point of view, the standard variety has a position equal to that of the native dialect in the active linguistic repertoires of the citizens of Hemnes.
4. Back to H e m n e s - Theory, data and m e t h o d o l o g y
The crucial difference between dialect and standard speech, as noted above, lies in the different social identities and socio-cultural values that are signalled by these varieties. According to Blom and Gumperz, this well-defined symbolic function is the most important reason why Ranamdl and the standard language are kept completely separate, without mixing, in the Hemnes community. The clear segregation of the two varieties is explained as being the consequence of certain sociolinguistic "selection constraints" (p. 416). More precisely, Blom and Gumperz assume the existence of a set of structural co-occurrence restrictions within each variety, which function in such a way that selection of, for example, a morphological variant belonging to the dialect will automatically also imply the selection of dialectal variants in the rest of the utterance (and vice versa for the standard variety). They thus postulate a very rigid structural connection between the components that comprise the two linguistic varieties. This unifying force then functions, they claim, both within and between the different linguistic levels and thus produces "general co-occurrences among phonetic and allomorphic and lexical variables" (ibid.). Although they do not explicitly state at what syntagmatic levels this co-variation is supposed to occur, both 'sentence' and 'utterance' are mentioned. Given such strong internal cohesion between the elements and the linguistic levels of each variety, it is clear that, in principle, the probability of any interference phenomena to occur should be strongly reduced, if not completely eliminated. In practice, one would therefore expect that such system-conditioned selection constraints would result in totally homogeneous sequences of language which would correspond only to one of the two structurally well-defined varieties. How, then, does this theoretical edifice relate to Blom and Gumperz' own empirical data? Do Hemnes residents really indulge in consistent and context-dependent differentiation between the local dialect and a spoken standard? Or do the co-occurrence restrictions claimed by Blom and Gumperz break down, and if yes, to what extent? It should be noticed that their paper is somewhat lacking in concrete linguistic data: the material that is presented consists for the most part of a small number of brief sequences quoted from remarks made by members of the different test
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groups (see more on this below). In the researchers' discussions of the data itself, one typically finds observations such as: "Linguistically, we noted some switch to the standard in such exchanges" (p. 427, my emphasis) "In neither case is the switch to the standard complete [...] What we see then is a breakdown of co-occurrence rules, an erosion of the linguistic boundary between Ranamhl and Bokm~. The tendency is to switch toward standard phonology while preserving some morpbophonemic and lexical dialect features of (R) [i.e. Ranamdl]." (p. 429) "Furthermore, even in the case of these dialect characteristics, speakers do not alternate between two clearly distinguishable articulation points; rather, the switch takes the form of a displacement along a scale in which palatalized consonants show at least three degrees of palatalization [...] and/a/and/~e/ each show three degrees of retraction and lowering." (p. 414) As far as I can tell, these descriptions can hardly be interpreted in any Other way than as referring to different types of modified dialect structures; structures that incorporate features from both the local Rana dialect and the spoken standard. A very notable feature of this scenario would thus seem to be interference at different linguistic levels, and not - as Blom and Gumperz assert elsewhere - a total separation between two discrete language systems. The authors' theoretical argumentation thus reads rather strangely, given its obvious lack of correspondence with the linguistic data they themselves present. It is, then, not at all obvious that the model of codeswitching which they have put forward has any transparent relevance for the strategies illustrated in the empirical data. The only exception which Blom and Gumperz themselves call attention to in connection with their strict differentiation model relates to a group of university students who have left their home area and who have for several years spent only relatively brief holiday periods in Hemnes. It is clearly stated by Blom and Gumperz that Ranamdl and standard speech are definitely not kept completely separate by these speakers, and that they instead produce different types of synthesis of the two varieties: "For the students, on the other hand, the distinction between dialect and standard is not so sharp [...] their behavior shows a range of variations rather than an altemation between distinct systems" (p. 431). Given that discrete codeswitching is reported as being the normal strategy in Henmes, it is rather remarkable that it is precisely in the case of the students - who have left the area - that Blom and Gumperz' co-occurrence restrictions are said not to be maintained. It is much more likely that just these speakers, because of their long-term residence in other linguistic environments, would be much better than the permanent Hemnes residents at keeping the relevant language systems completely separate. Experience in this field suggests, in any case, that mobile individuals who have more or less consciously acquired the ability to speak a standard variety, are able to use this variety with a minimum amount of dialect interference. Even so, it is of course possible that the students in Blom and Gumperz' investigation were deliberately trying to speak their original dialect in the test situation, but that they were unable to avoid standard forms which had become more or less automatic in their speech.
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In addition to controlled observation of the self-recruited experimental groups, additional (and for the most part unsystematic) methods of data collection also formed an important part of the background to Blom and Gumperz' description of the speech situation in Hemnes. They themselves say of their own research methods that "Our discussion of verbal behaviour so far has relied largely on deductive reasoning supported by unstructured ethnographic observation" (p. 426, my emphasis). The experimental situations were set up mainly to test hypotheses that had already been developed, in particular the hypothesis that Ranamdl and Bokmdl constitute two distinct codes in the community's verbal repertoire. The account given by Blom and Gumperz clearly demonstrates the extent to which this hypothesis of two discrete varieties, each with strong linguistic co-occurrence rules, was prominent in the empirical part of the study, and thus exerted a decisive influence on their methods of data collection. For example, the informants were explicitly required to pronounce different sequences in dialect and in the standard variety, successively: "[They] were asked to produce single words, sentences and short texts, first in dialect and then in the standard" (p. 411). Such a methodology shows that even before the process of data collection, the dichotomy between the two varieties was established not simply as an opposition between two idealized normative structures, but as a supposedly real opposition in actual linguistic usage. It is therefore difficult to see how the structured presentation and comparison of equivalent word forms and inflections in Ranamdl and Bokmdl (cfo pp. 412-413) can be of any value in the documentation of actual linguistic switching patterns in Hemnes. In fact, all Norwegian speakers over a certain age would probably be able to demonstrate, tf asked, a comparable opposition between their own dialect and the spoken standard. That in itself says, however, nothing about what strategies they are actually using in ordinary communication situations. Blom and Gumperz' characterization of language use in more authentic social contexts (i.e. their 'unstructured ethnographic observation') is furthermore so imprecise and vague that it can scarcely form the basis for an analysis of normal linguistic behaviour in Hemnes. For example, they say that: -
"When, on the one hand, we speak of someone giving a classroom lecture or performing a Lutheran church service or talking to a tourist, we can safely assume that he is using (B) [i.e. Bokmdl] grammatical forms." (pp. 424--425,my emphasis) And similarly: "Likewise, when residents step up to a clerk's desk, greetings and inquiries about family affairs tended to be exhanged in the dialect, while the business part of the transaction is carded on in the standard." (p. 425, my emphasis) Apart from the fact that these switching patterns seem quite unreasonable in a Norwegian context, we are, on the whole, justified in expressing considerable puzzlement and scepticism with respect to a number of the methods Blom and Gumperz employed in collecting data in Hemnes. A fundamental prerequisite in any study of interaction between different language systems must be a thorough knowledge of the
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linguistic structures that are involved in the contact. In addition to this specificially linguistic knowledge, there are also certain technical and methodological demands which must be met in order for possible switching relationships between the relevant varieties to be documented in a completely reliable manner. For example, it is an absolute condition of studies of this type that the linguistic corpus should be collected in such a way that it can be reproduced for the purposes of analysis, which in fact means using tape recordings. This is particularly necessary in case the researcher needs to consult other specialists about the identification of particular speech forms. In Blom and Gumperz' Hemnes study, however, important empirical and theoretical aspects of the work are based, as we have seen, on "deductive reasoning, supported by unstructured ethnographic observation" (p. 426). The claim that discrete switching between dialect and standard takes place in, for instance, the local government office in Hemnes (p. 425) must obviously be based entirely on a methodology of this kind. There is certainly nothing in the discussion of this particular instance of topic-conditioned switching to indicate that any form of recording equipment was used (in contrast to the more formal test situations, where the recording methods are more clearly explained). In this instance, then, the basis for the analysis can only have been provided by the acoustic signals that were available at the time of observation; cf. descriptions such as: "In the course of a morning spent at the community administration office, we noticed that clerks used both standard and dialect phrases, depending on whether they were talking about official affairs or not [...] The two then stepped aside, although remaining in the same room, and their subsequent private discussion was appropriatelycarried on entirely in the dialect." (pp. 425-426) It should be quite obvious that this method of recording linguistic behaviour is unjustifiable and unsatisfactory - especially when potential instances of switching and interference are to be documented. The perceptual abilities of human beings are normally not so well developed that it is practically feasible to undertake systematic identification of all the speech forms occurring in lengthy continuous stretches of speech in this way. Blom and Gumperz, however, believe that they are able to do just that. Even for a linguist with excellent hearing and with a relatively thorough knowledge of the relevant speech varieties, such a method of observing and recording would be rather unreliable. And it appears even more undesirable when one considers that Gumperz, who was the only linguist of the two, is an English-speaker, or to put it more correctly, does not speak Norwegian, while Blom, who is a Norwegian social anthropologist, is not a native of Hemnes. Given these practical and methodological reservations, it would surely be very difficult to use these data to argue that any distinct, systematic switching between the two varieties occurs. Most probably, the switching strategies which Blom and Gumperz recorded in Hemnes actually represent some form of variant switching, whereby, in certain contexts, single words, (idiomatic) expressions, and grammatical forms from the standard are introduced into otherwise dialectal utterances. That does not mean, however, that there is any systematic and distinct alternation here between two structurally defined varieties. Another important question in this connection is
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how one should best establish a framework for determining which features can be regarded as belonging to the local dialect versus to the standard. A whole series of sociolinguistic studies shows that the inclusion in everyday speech of a variable set of elements from the standard is an entirely normal strategy in many Norwegian communities today (see also fn. 3). The objections I have offered and the scepticism I have demonstrated towards Blom and Gumperz' well-known Hemnes study do not, of course, mean that the term 'codeswitching' is not an apposite description for the conventional switching strategies that are used by Norwegian speakers. The notion of 'codeswitching' in no way presupposes that all context-dependent alternations should take the form of discrete variety switching between, for example, local dialect and spoken standard. Rather than dealing with different switching strategies on the basis of linguistic forms alone, sociolinguists have also chosen to focus on the pragmatic implications, emphasizing above all the social significance such strategies can have in different contexts (see, for example, Hasan, 1973: 258ff.; Scotton, 1986; Romaine, 1989: 147). In this research paradigm, in which Gumperz himself has a very central position, the concept of 'code' must include all the semantic factors which, in a given social situation, condition linguistic behaviour. And there is no presupposition here that individual switching strategies have to take the form of alternations between highly-focussed language varieties in order to qualify for the label 'codeswitching'. Individual codes can rather incorporate components from several varieties in their structure and thus take the form of a kind of variety mixing. The essential thing is therefore the potential social meaning inherent in different patterns of verbal behaviour. This point is expressed particularly clearly in the description that Blom and Gumperz give of the switching strategies employed by the two students in spite of the fact that it was precisely these two informants who were said to be unusual in not maintaining the supposed co-occurrence restrictions between R a n a m d l and the standard: "Both [i.e., two of the students], however, switch in the same direction in response to similar situational and topical clues, and this agreement on the rules for stylistic manipulation is clearly more important in this case than the more articulatory difference in Berit's and Ola's speech." (p. 430, my emphasis) Continuous switching of this sort between dialect and standard speech is a phenomenon which corresponds much more closely to switching patterns that have been noted in other parts of Scandinavia (and also, as already has been emphasized, among rural speakers in Oslo, cf. Rekdal, 1971, and M~ehlum, 1986). In a country such as Sweden, where the dialects have traditionally had a lower status than in Norway and where formal school education in the codified national spoken language is regularly practiced, it is precisely these relative, gradual transitions between the two extremes of dialect and standard which seem to be characteristic of the overall linguistic picture (see, for example, Thelander, 1979). Once again, neither here there is an absolute dichotomy between the two linguistic entities, a fact which is reflected in the use of the term 'regional standard', which, as I said above, refers to various syntheses of dialect and standard features.
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What basis, then, can Blom and Gumperz have had for their particular interpretation of the linguistic situation in Hemnes? Does their characterization of the Hemnes speakers' discrete switching strategies have any basis at all in Norwegian linguistic reality? By taking the concept of ' m o d e l ' as a point of departure, we can probably achieve a better understanding of the methodological errors the two researchers have made in their description of this community. My suggestion is that Blom and Gumperz have constructed and described a theoretical model of the Hemnes speech community, a model that is based on certain theories concerning the sociolinguistic structure of bi- and multilingual societies, combined with a general knowledge of Norwegian social conditions. In scientific analysis, such models can fulfil an important role in providing a reduced picture of reality, which can serve a useful heuristic function by contributing to the development of a simplified schematic representation of complex empirical patterns (see, for example, Weizenbaum, 1976: 149). In Blom and Gumperz' study, however, this theoretical model has unfortunately been ascribed empirical status. The model, that is, has been treated as if it were on a par with reality, and there is no real attempt in their account to differentiate between the two different stages of the analytical process. We therefore have to question very seriously the extent to which this model can be directly valid for any study of the Norwegian linguistic situation. True, there are certain basic dimensions of the model which can be said to reflect some of the general idealized norms and socio-semantic structures associated with a Norwegian linguistic reality. On the other side, however, the model contains so many essentially erroneous and defective assertions and postulates about the relationship between dialect and spoken standard in Norway that it needs radical changes before it can be accepted for direct application to the study of linguistic situations in real-life Norwegian communities.
References Appel, Ren6 and Pieter Muysken, 1987. Language contact and bilingualism. London: Edward Arnold. Bandle, Oscar, 1982. Sociolingvistiskastrukturer i de nordiska spr~en. Om fOrh~landet mellan standard, regionalsprLk och dialekt [Sociolinguistic structures in the Scandinavian languages. On the relation between standard, regional standard and dialect]. In: M. Thelander, ed., Talspr~tksforskning i Norden [Research on spoken language in Scandinavia], 33-50. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Bartsch, Renate, 1987. Norms of language. London: Longman. Blom, Jan-Petter and John J. Gumperz, 1972. Social meaning in linguistic structures: Codeswitching in Norway. In: J. Gumperz and D. Hymes, eds., Directions in sociolinguistics, 407-434. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston. [Reprinted 1989] Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information 16: 654-668. Bull, Tove, 1986. Gransking av nordnorsk m~ [Research on North-Norwegian dialects]. In: Nordlyd 12. Working Papers on Language and Linguistics, University of Troms¢, 56-93. Gal, Susan, 1988. The political economy of code choice. In: M. Heller, ed., 245-264. Gibbons, John, 1987. Code-mixing and code choice. A Hong Kong case study. Multilingual Matters 27, Philadelphia. Gumperz, John J., 1964. Linguistic and social interaction in two communities. In: J.J. Gumperz, 1971, Language in social groups, 151-176. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gumperz, John J., 1982. Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Hasan, Ruqaiya, 1973. Code, register and social dialect. In: B. Bernstein, ed., Class, code and control, Vol. 2: 253-292. London: Routledge. Heller, Monica, 1988. Introduction. In: M. Heller, ed., 1-24. Heller, Monica, ed., 1988. Codeswitching. Anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hudson, Richard A., 1980. Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jahr, Ernst H~tkon, 1984. Talemglet i skolen. En studie av dr0ftinger og bestemmelser om muntlig sprAkbruk i folkeskolen (fra 1874 til 1925) [Spoken language in primary education. A study of discussions and regulations on spoken language in primary school (from 1874 to 1925)]. Oslo: Novus. Le Page, Robert and Andr6a Tabouret-Keller, 1985. Acts of identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, Lesley, 1987a. Observing & analyzing natural language (= Language in Society 12). Oxford: Blackwell. Milroy, Lesley, 1987b. Language and social networks (2nd edition) (= Language in Society 2). Oxford: Blackwell. M~ehlum, Brit, 1986. Sprhklige variasjonsm0nstre hos innflyttere i Oslo [Patterns of linguistic variation among Norwegians who have relocated to Oslo]. Oslo: Novus. Poplack, Sharon, 1988. Contrasting patterns of codeswitching in two communities. In: M. Heller, ed., 215-244. Rekdal, Olaug, 1971. Modifisert dialekt [Modified dialect]. Unpublished thesis, University of Oslo. Romaine, Suzanne, 1989. Bilingualism. (= Language in Society 13). Oxford: Blackwell. Scotton, Carol M., 1980. Explaining linguistic choices as identity negotiations. In: H. Giles and W.P. Robinson and P.M. Smith, eds., Language. Social psychological perspectives, 359-366. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Scotton, Carol M., 1983. The negotiation of identities in conversation: A theory of markedness and code choice. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 44:115-136. Scotton, Carol M., 1986. Diglossia and code switching. In: J.A. Fishman et al., eds., Sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, Vol. 2: The Fergusonian impact, 403-415. Berlin: Mouton. Scotton, Carol M., 1988. Codeswitching as indexical of social negotiations. In: M. Heller, ed., 151-186. Thelander, Mats, 1979. Sprlikliga variationsmodeller till~rnpade p~ nutida Burtr~isktal I and II [Linguistic variation models applied on contemporary speech in Burtriisk]. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 14: 1-2, Uppsala. Venhs, Kjell, 1982. MAI og milj¢. Innf0ring i sosiolingvistikk eller sprLksosiologi [Language and environment. An introduction to sociolinguistics or the sociology of language]. Oslo: Novus. Wardhaugh, Ronald, 1990 [1986]. An introduction to sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. Weizenbaum, Joseph, 1976. Computer power and human reason. San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman. [An earlier, Norwegian version of this article has been printed in Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 5, 1987/1, 29-43; a preliminary English version has appeared in Troms0 Linguistics in the Eighties (= Troms0 Studies in Linguistics 11). 1990, 338-355. Oslo: Novus Press.]
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Codeswitching in Hemnesberget - Myth or reality? Brit M~ehlum Department of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Trondheim. N-7055 Dragvoll, Norway
ReceivedDecember1994; revisedversionFebruary 1995 Abstract In this article I will discuss the main hypotheses in J.-P. Blom and J.J. Gumperz' (1972) classical and pivotal study 'Social meaning in linguistic structures: Codeswitching in Norway'. The research of Blom and Gumperz was carried out in the village of Hemnes in Northern Norway, and the focus of the study is the internal relationship between Ranamdl, i.e. the local dialect, and Bokmdl, i.e. a standardized national spoken variety. According to Blom and Gumperz these two varieties play equivalent roles in the verbal repertoire of the Hemnes population, they are kept completely separate by the speakers and represent as such the main components in discrete codeswitching strategies in this community. My primary intention, then, is to demonstrate that Blom and Gumperz have given a portrayal of a situation that can not be comprehensive of any real-life Norwegian community. I will try to show that their assumptions are based on unjustifiable and unsatisfactory premises, both with respect to certain theoretical as well as methodological principles.
1. Introduction The research carried out by J.-P. Blom and J.J. Gumperz (1972) in the village of Hemnes in Northem Norway has received close attention in a series of papers and reviews dealing with various forms of linguistic codeswitching. And first and foremost it has been referred to within the field of theory building connected to codeswitching phenomena (see, for example, recent works such as Appel and Muysken, 1987: 29; Bartsch, 1987: 105; Gal, 1988; Heller, 1988; Hudson, 1980: 56; Milroy, 1987a: 64ff., Milroy, 1987b: 17-18, 31ff.; Poplack, 1988; Romaine, 1989: 259; Scotton, 1988; Wardhaugh, 1990: 105). As a result, this research has come to play a pivotal role in theoretical interactional sociolinguistics, and is also widely regarded as being a good representative of Gumperz' many other anthropological-linguistic studies. Furthermore, very little attention has been paid to specificially * The article has been translated from Norwegian by Jean Hannah and Peter Trudgill. 0378-2166/96/$15.00 © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(95)00027-5
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Norwegian linguistic conditions in the international sociolinguistic literature, and because of the status that has been afforded this classic Hemnes investigation, it is probable that its findings will be generalized from and come to be regarded as typical of all small Norwegian communities. Given this extensive international interest, it is surprising that Blom and Gumperz' study has attracted so little comment or debate from Norwegian linguists, and that no comparable follow-up studies have been undertaken anywhere else in Norway which could shed further light on the Hemnes findings. One of the few linguists who has produced an explicitly negative critique of Blom and Gumperz' work is Kjell Venhs who, in his introductory sociolinguistics book Mdl og MiljO (1982), is very critical of several of the central theses of the Hemnes study (see also Bull, 1986: 79, for similarly critical comments): "One cannot help but be somewhat surprised at a number of the things that Blom and Gumperz say, nor help doubting, at least up to a point, whether they have given a comprehensive portrayal of the linguistic situation in Hemnesberget. 1...] It is not known for anyone to leap from pure dialect to pure standard speech in this way in any other INorwegian] rural community, and this cannot be correct for Hemnesberget either. On the contrary, the usual thing is for speakers to demonstrate many intermediate stages between the one linguistic pole and the other." (Ven~s, 1982: 78, my translation)
One of the fundamental premises of Blom and Gumperz' work lies in the assumption that both Ranamdl (i.e. the local dialect) and Bokmdl ~ (a standardized national spoken variety) play equivalent roles in the verbal repertoire of the Hemnes population. According to Blom and Gumperz, these two varieties constitute between them the community's full linguisti c range, and thus comprise the sum total of means of verbal communication that are available for social interaction. Another assumption which is fundamental to their overall view is that the two varieties are kept completely separate by speakers; the choice between them is conditioned by certain socio-semantic structures, and these constraints produce a sharp differentiation between the varieties from one social context to another. The local dialect and the normalized speech variety thus, according to Blom and Gumperz, participate in a process of discrete codeswitching in this community. Gumperz in later works (1982) has employed the term 'discourse strategy' to characterize codeswitching as an interactional principle. His use of this term depends on the assumption that speech can signal distinct social and cultural values in interpersonal relations. In other words, verbal behaviour is of particular social significance, and can thus be used to project certain aspects of our socio-cultural identity. From this point of view, linguistic behaviour is to be regarded as a series of 'acts of identity' (see.Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) - an expression of the negotiation of the participants' personal identities and their search for particular social roles (see also, for example, Scotton, 1980 and 1983). It is within an interactional-theoretical framework of this type that Blom and Gumperz set up an This is Blom and Gumperz' terminology. In what follows, I will, however, prefer terms such as 'normalized' or 'standardized variety' or better '(spoken) standard' to refer to this variety. Bokmdl is actually a term which designates an officially-coded written norm, and it should therefore not, without further specification, be applied to any variety of spoken Norwegian.
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opposition between dialect and standard speech in Hemnes to represent a contrast between local and national values respectively. This originally regional opposition is also, however, closely bound up with distinct status differences, such that the standard variety mainly connotes prestige, power, and authority, while the dialect is a marker of specific local identity and loyality - an asymmetric relationship that Bourdieu (1977) calls a 'symbolic domination'. The individual speaker's choice of code is also limited and controlled by a complex of contextual factors, such as topic, interlocutor, and the objectives of the interaction, all of which contribute to the selection of one of the two varieties. Obviously, the major points of Blom and Gumperz' study have made a highly important contribution to interactional sociolinguistics. The question is, however, whether their model can legitimately be applied to the actual linguistic reality that they encountered in the Norwegian community of Hemnes. There are many indications that, given their experience from work elsewhere in totally different socio-cultural and linguistic conditions, Blom and Gumperz have taken sociolinguistic structures that they know to be present in these other societies and then, as it were, projected an outline of these structures onto a Norwegian social reality. It is, surely, significant that immediate intuitive reactions to this work by Norwegians, linguists and non-linguists alike, consist of a complete lack of recognition of, and thus strong scepticism about, the results. These objections and criticisms concern many of Blom and Gumperz' most basic assertions about linguistic strategies in Hemnes, and suggest very strongly that the picture painted by Blom and Gumperz quite simply does not tally with the actual linguistic situation that we find in Norway. Moreover, even though I am not personally familiar with the Hemnes locality investigated by Blom and Gumperz, it is possible to point to several other indications that this scepticism about their findings is well-grounded. In the following, I will therefore attempt to amplify and give more specific examples of some of these criticisms of the Hemnes study, and thus help to clarify why it is that, as Ven~s says, we "[...] cannot help but be somewhat surprised at a number of the things that Blom and Gumperz say". 2. Hemnes - An atypical Norwegian community? To begin with, I must concede that it is of course not an entirely satisfactory scientific procedure to assert that, simply because the principles of linguistic switching that have been described for Hemnes have not been documented anywhere else in Norway, they cannot a priori be correct. It is, theoretically speaking, possible that very unusual social conditions may exist in this north Norwegian village which could help to explain these highly, I will maintain, un-Norwegian verbal strategies. 2 However, from the description that Blom and Gumperz give of the socio-cultural 2 By un-Norwegian I mean: hitherto not found or described elsewhere in Norway. In other words, Blom and Gumperz' model is based on a verbal principle which probably nobody will be familiar with within the Norwegian speech community-- with the exception of some individual speakers who have grown up under quite special dialectconditions(see below).
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conditions found in this small community, it would seem to be the case that there is nothing which could in any logical way explain the switching patterns which they claim to have observed. On the contrary, they describe a rather conventional Norwegian rural community, with social values and structures that do not in any way diverge from the general Norwegian cultural pattern. The social structure is relatively egalitarian, without any marked or formalized social hierarchy of the type that exists in, for example, several of the cultural areas where Gumperz has carried out some of his other linguistic studies (for example, Gumperz, 1964). One of the main tenets of Blom and Gumperz' theory is that there is an intimate relationship between the socio-ecological system and verbal behaviour; therefore, some of my criticisms must be directed precisely at those conditions which relate to this basic thesis. My contention here is that there are in fact no factors in the socio-cultural environments in Hemnes which could in any way be expected to cause such a distinct - and thus very un-Norwegian -altemation between dialect and standard. Before I give a more general evaluation of the relationship between dialect and standard in Norway, it may be helpful to call attention to a special category of speakers who we might consider to be likely to exhibit switching patterns of the type described by Blom and Gumperz. Within the socially heterogeneous ranks of speakers of Norwegian who have in some way or another been geographically mobile, I know from experience that there are certain individuals who are able to alternate in a more or less clearcut manner between different varieties, whether it is a question of switching between dialect and spoken standard, or of an alternation between two different dialects. Unfortunately, there have so far been few investigations in Norway of the language used by mobile speakers of this type, and it is therefore difficult to give a detailed description of the nature and extent of this kind of switching. There are, however, many indications that bidialectism of this type is primarily a strategy that is associated with children who have grown up in, or moved to, a speech community where their parents' dialect(s) deviates from the language of the majority of the other people around them. As far as mobile adults are concerned, on the other hand, there are at least two Norwegian studies which demonstrate clearly that moving from one area to another does not necessarily result in individual codeswitching strategies that involve clear differentiation between the relevant varieties. In these two studies (Rekdal, 1971, and M~ehlum, 1986), which both deal with rural dialect speakers living in the capital of Norway, Oslo, it has been shown that, on the contrary, features from both the original dialect and the spoken standard are to be found in individuals' speech simultaneously. In other words, their speech is characterized by varying degrees of interference at different linguistic levels. It is thus possible to point to a more or less marked substratum effect from the original dialect in the speech of every single informant. The discrete context-conditioned switching between dialect and standard which is claimed to be the predominant form of variation in Hemnes, occurs in my material (Maehlum, 1986), for example, only to a very particular and highly limited extent. In spite of the fact that the two conversational contexts set up for my study mainly symbolized values associated with standard speech and dialect respectively, only two of the four informants were keeping dialect and standard variants apart
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between one context and the other, and then only for one variable out of a total of eleven. Otherwise, the speech of these informants is characterized by a mixture of dialect and standard forms in the same social context; a mixture that also appears within one sentence, and even within the boundaries of one and the same lexical unit. Context-conditioned variation does, however, occur, but is manifested for the most part as a matter of degree, with relative proportions of dialect and standard variants changing from context to context, with marked individual differences. Possibly John Gibbons' (1987) concept of 'code swaying' can be used to refer to relative readjustments, or gradual transitions, of this kind in an individual, more or less constant hybrid repertoire. At the same time, certain individual variables appear to be capable of having a more outstanding signalizing function as dialect or standard indicators (see, for example, Thelander, 1979 II: 53), and in these particular cases one thus does find a clearer differentiation between the two social contexts in my material. Relative situations of this sort, with continuum-like transitions between 'pure' dialect and 'pure' standard, are apparently characteristic of the Norwegian linguistic situation generally. Individual context-conditioned switching strategies most often take the form of movement between two idealized extremes, but nearly always in such a way that speech becomes more or less standardized, or more or less markedly dialectal. The last years, however, there has been some focussing on the so-called 'regional standards', which are a kind of standard varieties developed on a clear dialectal substratum. But each of these quite recently developed varieties is in fact not a homogeneous and stable entity, but rather a complex, variable and diffuse synthesis of dialectal and standard features (see, for example, Bandle, 1982: 44-46, with references to several Norwegian studies). In any case, for a large proportion of dialect-speaking Norwegians, approximation to the standard occurs only through the modification of single words and grammatical forms or of particular idiomatic expressions. In addition, certain other individual speakers are able to carry out structural, and very often also systematic, changes of the original dialect at, for example, the phonological and morphological levels. In my opinion, however, the crucial point here is that dialect and standard should be regarded primarily as idealized entities: it is their existence as norms which is important)
3. Standard spoken language in Norway The postulate of Ranamdl and Bokm~l as equivalent linguistic structures in the Hemnes community's verbal repertoire is, as we saw above, fundamental to Blom and Gumperz' study. They refer to these two varieties collectively as "the totality 3 Severalindicators suggest rather clearly that Blom and Gumperz have an idealized view of dialects that to a considerable extent tallies with what is more or less implicit in traditional dialectology. Each language system is regarded as a completely homogeneous and static entity, in which any elements from, for example, standardized speech are regarded as structural deviations from the 'genuine', 'original' and 'pure' dialect. Sociolectal variation within a dialectologically-defined area can, thus, hardly be reconciled with a theoretical construct of this type.
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of linguistic resources which speakers may employ in social interaction" (p. 411), and make no attempt to set up any typological distinction between them. It is true, however, that they do point out that there is a difference in the acquisition of the two varieties, designating the dialect as 'the mother tongue', and describing Bokmdl as the official language of formal education. But Blom and Gumperz also note that schooling is obligatory in Norway, and then, without any reservation, come to the conclusion that "[...] allowing for certain individual differences in fluency, all speakers of Ranamdl also control the standard" (p. 411, my emphasis). They thus take for granted that these two varieties are equally well established in the community. The internal relationship between them is, furthermore, portrayed almost as a diglossic one - a characterisation which, on any definition of diglossia, cannot be said to be an accurate portrayal of the linguistic situation in Norway. By equating dialect and standard in this way, Blom and Gumperz completely disregard certain crucial aspects of normal linguistic socialization. Therefore, they also ignore the different positions the two varieties have within individual language competence. In the first place, it is essential to stress that there are vital and very basic differences between the acquisition processes associated with a speaker's original dialect and those associated with a supraregional spoken standard, at least in terms of the typical Norwegian language scene. 4 Dialects are normally acquired through primary socialization in a given, geographically delimited community, and here it is the intimate social network with mainly parents, siblings and friends who function as linguistic models. In this kind of dialectal environment, standardized speech is usually a linguistic variety that children are primarily exposed to via the audio-visual mass media, and later on also when they learn to read and write at school. However, no codified spoken standard of such a language variety exists in Norway, and there is therefore no formalized training in its use (unlike, say, the situation in Sweden and Denmark). On the contrary, any use of the spoken standard as the normal language of education in schools, such as Blom and Gumperz describe for Hemnes, represents a clear violation of official Norwegian regulations (see, for example, Jahr, 1984). According to the Odelsting ('Lower House Legislature') Resolution of 1878 (and § 40.1 of the current Elementary School Law), pupils have an absolute right to use their own dialect in lessons, and, although clear breaches of this rule have certainly been reported in a number of cases, the teacher must even take pupils' colloquial language into account as far as it is possible. Formal competence in the use of the standard language in Norway therefore for the most part consists of the ability to express oneself in this variety only in writing. Almost inevitably, of course, schools do to an extent help to promote a certain standardization of the spoken language as well, but insofar as this occurs, it is a standardization of speech that is based overwhelmingly on the acquisition of the formal written language.
4 TO define precisely - for my purpose here, I leave out of account those individuals who have a standard language as their mother tongue.
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A speech variety that is acquired in this more or less indirect way, through schools as official socialization agencies, is very unlikely to be internalized in the individual language user in the same way as the primary, localized dialect. The question therefore arises as to what extent such a secondarily acquired speech variety can be integrated into an individual's active verbal repertoire. The formal requirement in Norwegian schools extends only to passive competence. Unfortunately Blom and Gumperz make no attempt to differentiate between active and passive components of a linguistic repertoire. On the contrary, they actually maintain that, from a linguistic point of view, the standard variety has a position equal to that of the native dialect in the active linguistic repertoires of the citizens of Hemnes.
4. Back to H e m n e s - Theory, data and m e t h o d o l o g y
The crucial difference between dialect and standard speech, as noted above, lies in the different social identities and socio-cultural values that are signalled by these varieties. According to Blom and Gumperz, this well-defined symbolic function is the most important reason why Ranamdl and the standard language are kept completely separate, without mixing, in the Hemnes community. The clear segregation of the two varieties is explained as being the consequence of certain sociolinguistic "selection constraints" (p. 416). More precisely, Blom and Gumperz assume the existence of a set of structural co-occurrence restrictions within each variety, which function in such a way that selection of, for example, a morphological variant belonging to the dialect will automatically also imply the selection of dialectal variants in the rest of the utterance (and vice versa for the standard variety). They thus postulate a very rigid structural connection between the components that comprise the two linguistic varieties. This unifying force then functions, they claim, both within and between the different linguistic levels and thus produces "general co-occurrences among phonetic and allomorphic and lexical variables" (ibid.). Although they do not explicitly state at what syntagmatic levels this co-variation is supposed to occur, both 'sentence' and 'utterance' are mentioned. Given such strong internal cohesion between the elements and the linguistic levels of each variety, it is clear that, in principle, the probability of any interference phenomena to occur should be strongly reduced, if not completely eliminated. In practice, one would therefore expect that such system-conditioned selection constraints would result in totally homogeneous sequences of language which would correspond only to one of the two structurally well-defined varieties. How, then, does this theoretical edifice relate to Blom and Gumperz' own empirical data? Do Hemnes residents really indulge in consistent and context-dependent differentiation between the local dialect and a spoken standard? Or do the co-occurrence restrictions claimed by Blom and Gumperz break down, and if yes, to what extent? It should be noticed that their paper is somewhat lacking in concrete linguistic data: the material that is presented consists for the most part of a small number of brief sequences quoted from remarks made by members of the different test
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groups (see more on this below). In the researchers' discussions of the data itself, one typically finds observations such as: "Linguistically, we noted some switch to the standard in such exchanges" (p. 427, my emphasis) "In neither case is the switch to the standard complete [...] What we see then is a breakdown of co-occurrence rules, an erosion of the linguistic boundary between Ranamhl and Bokm~. The tendency is to switch toward standard phonology while preserving some morpbophonemic and lexical dialect features of (R) [i.e. Ranamdl]." (p. 429) "Furthermore, even in the case of these dialect characteristics, speakers do not alternate between two clearly distinguishable articulation points; rather, the switch takes the form of a displacement along a scale in which palatalized consonants show at least three degrees of palatalization [...] and/a/and/~e/ each show three degrees of retraction and lowering." (p. 414) As far as I can tell, these descriptions can hardly be interpreted in any Other way than as referring to different types of modified dialect structures; structures that incorporate features from both the local Rana dialect and the spoken standard. A very notable feature of this scenario would thus seem to be interference at different linguistic levels, and not - as Blom and Gumperz assert elsewhere - a total separation between two discrete language systems. The authors' theoretical argumentation thus reads rather strangely, given its obvious lack of correspondence with the linguistic data they themselves present. It is, then, not at all obvious that the model of codeswitching which they have put forward has any transparent relevance for the strategies illustrated in the empirical data. The only exception which Blom and Gumperz themselves call attention to in connection with their strict differentiation model relates to a group of university students who have left their home area and who have for several years spent only relatively brief holiday periods in Hemnes. It is clearly stated by Blom and Gumperz that Ranamdl and standard speech are definitely not kept completely separate by these speakers, and that they instead produce different types of synthesis of the two varieties: "For the students, on the other hand, the distinction between dialect and standard is not so sharp [...] their behavior shows a range of variations rather than an altemation between distinct systems" (p. 431). Given that discrete codeswitching is reported as being the normal strategy in Henmes, it is rather remarkable that it is precisely in the case of the students - who have left the area - that Blom and Gumperz' co-occurrence restrictions are said not to be maintained. It is much more likely that just these speakers, because of their long-term residence in other linguistic environments, would be much better than the permanent Hemnes residents at keeping the relevant language systems completely separate. Experience in this field suggests, in any case, that mobile individuals who have more or less consciously acquired the ability to speak a standard variety, are able to use this variety with a minimum amount of dialect interference. Even so, it is of course possible that the students in Blom and Gumperz' investigation were deliberately trying to speak their original dialect in the test situation, but that they were unable to avoid standard forms which had become more or less automatic in their speech.
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In addition to controlled observation of the self-recruited experimental groups, additional (and for the most part unsystematic) methods of data collection also formed an important part of the background to Blom and Gumperz' description of the speech situation in Hemnes. They themselves say of their own research methods that "Our discussion of verbal behaviour so far has relied largely on deductive reasoning supported by unstructured ethnographic observation" (p. 426, my emphasis). The experimental situations were set up mainly to test hypotheses that had already been developed, in particular the hypothesis that Ranamdl and Bokmdl constitute two distinct codes in the community's verbal repertoire. The account given by Blom and Gumperz clearly demonstrates the extent to which this hypothesis of two discrete varieties, each with strong linguistic co-occurrence rules, was prominent in the empirical part of the study, and thus exerted a decisive influence on their methods of data collection. For example, the informants were explicitly required to pronounce different sequences in dialect and in the standard variety, successively: "[They] were asked to produce single words, sentences and short texts, first in dialect and then in the standard" (p. 411). Such a methodology shows that even before the process of data collection, the dichotomy between the two varieties was established not simply as an opposition between two idealized normative structures, but as a supposedly real opposition in actual linguistic usage. It is therefore difficult to see how the structured presentation and comparison of equivalent word forms and inflections in Ranamdl and Bokmdl (cfo pp. 412-413) can be of any value in the documentation of actual linguistic switching patterns in Hemnes. In fact, all Norwegian speakers over a certain age would probably be able to demonstrate, tf asked, a comparable opposition between their own dialect and the spoken standard. That in itself says, however, nothing about what strategies they are actually using in ordinary communication situations. Blom and Gumperz' characterization of language use in more authentic social contexts (i.e. their 'unstructured ethnographic observation') is furthermore so imprecise and vague that it can scarcely form the basis for an analysis of normal linguistic behaviour in Hemnes. For example, they say that: -
"When, on the one hand, we speak of someone giving a classroom lecture or performing a Lutheran church service or talking to a tourist, we can safely assume that he is using (B) [i.e. Bokmdl] grammatical forms." (pp. 424--425,my emphasis) And similarly: "Likewise, when residents step up to a clerk's desk, greetings and inquiries about family affairs tended to be exhanged in the dialect, while the business part of the transaction is carded on in the standard." (p. 425, my emphasis) Apart from the fact that these switching patterns seem quite unreasonable in a Norwegian context, we are, on the whole, justified in expressing considerable puzzlement and scepticism with respect to a number of the methods Blom and Gumperz employed in collecting data in Hemnes. A fundamental prerequisite in any study of interaction between different language systems must be a thorough knowledge of the
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linguistic structures that are involved in the contact. In addition to this specificially linguistic knowledge, there are also certain technical and methodological demands which must be met in order for possible switching relationships between the relevant varieties to be documented in a completely reliable manner. For example, it is an absolute condition of studies of this type that the linguistic corpus should be collected in such a way that it can be reproduced for the purposes of analysis, which in fact means using tape recordings. This is particularly necessary in case the researcher needs to consult other specialists about the identification of particular speech forms. In Blom and Gumperz' Hemnes study, however, important empirical and theoretical aspects of the work are based, as we have seen, on "deductive reasoning, supported by unstructured ethnographic observation" (p. 426). The claim that discrete switching between dialect and standard takes place in, for instance, the local government office in Hemnes (p. 425) must obviously be based entirely on a methodology of this kind. There is certainly nothing in the discussion of this particular instance of topic-conditioned switching to indicate that any form of recording equipment was used (in contrast to the more formal test situations, where the recording methods are more clearly explained). In this instance, then, the basis for the analysis can only have been provided by the acoustic signals that were available at the time of observation; cf. descriptions such as: "In the course of a morning spent at the community administration office, we noticed that clerks used both standard and dialect phrases, depending on whether they were talking about official affairs or not [...] The two then stepped aside, although remaining in the same room, and their subsequent private discussion was appropriatelycarried on entirely in the dialect." (pp. 425-426) It should be quite obvious that this method of recording linguistic behaviour is unjustifiable and unsatisfactory - especially when potential instances of switching and interference are to be documented. The perceptual abilities of human beings are normally not so well developed that it is practically feasible to undertake systematic identification of all the speech forms occurring in lengthy continuous stretches of speech in this way. Blom and Gumperz, however, believe that they are able to do just that. Even for a linguist with excellent hearing and with a relatively thorough knowledge of the relevant speech varieties, such a method of observing and recording would be rather unreliable. And it appears even more undesirable when one considers that Gumperz, who was the only linguist of the two, is an English-speaker, or to put it more correctly, does not speak Norwegian, while Blom, who is a Norwegian social anthropologist, is not a native of Hemnes. Given these practical and methodological reservations, it would surely be very difficult to use these data to argue that any distinct, systematic switching between the two varieties occurs. Most probably, the switching strategies which Blom and Gumperz recorded in Hemnes actually represent some form of variant switching, whereby, in certain contexts, single words, (idiomatic) expressions, and grammatical forms from the standard are introduced into otherwise dialectal utterances. That does not mean, however, that there is any systematic and distinct alternation here between two structurally defined varieties. Another important question in this connection is
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how one should best establish a framework for determining which features can be regarded as belonging to the local dialect versus to the standard. A whole series of sociolinguistic studies shows that the inclusion in everyday speech of a variable set of elements from the standard is an entirely normal strategy in many Norwegian communities today (see also fn. 3). The objections I have offered and the scepticism I have demonstrated towards Blom and Gumperz' well-known Hemnes study do not, of course, mean that the term 'codeswitching' is not an apposite description for the conventional switching strategies that are used by Norwegian speakers. The notion of 'codeswitching' in no way presupposes that all context-dependent alternations should take the form of discrete variety switching between, for example, local dialect and spoken standard. Rather than dealing with different switching strategies on the basis of linguistic forms alone, sociolinguists have also chosen to focus on the pragmatic implications, emphasizing above all the social significance such strategies can have in different contexts (see, for example, Hasan, 1973: 258ff.; Scotton, 1986; Romaine, 1989: 147). In this research paradigm, in which Gumperz himself has a very central position, the concept of 'code' must include all the semantic factors which, in a given social situation, condition linguistic behaviour. And there is no presupposition here that individual switching strategies have to take the form of alternations between highly-focussed language varieties in order to qualify for the label 'codeswitching'. Individual codes can rather incorporate components from several varieties in their structure and thus take the form of a kind of variety mixing. The essential thing is therefore the potential social meaning inherent in different patterns of verbal behaviour. This point is expressed particularly clearly in the description that Blom and Gumperz give of the switching strategies employed by the two students in spite of the fact that it was precisely these two informants who were said to be unusual in not maintaining the supposed co-occurrence restrictions between R a n a m d l and the standard: "Both [i.e., two of the students], however, switch in the same direction in response to similar situational and topical clues, and this agreement on the rules for stylistic manipulation is clearly more important in this case than the more articulatory difference in Berit's and Ola's speech." (p. 430, my emphasis) Continuous switching of this sort between dialect and standard speech is a phenomenon which corresponds much more closely to switching patterns that have been noted in other parts of Scandinavia (and also, as already has been emphasized, among rural speakers in Oslo, cf. Rekdal, 1971, and M~ehlum, 1986). In a country such as Sweden, where the dialects have traditionally had a lower status than in Norway and where formal school education in the codified national spoken language is regularly practiced, it is precisely these relative, gradual transitions between the two extremes of dialect and standard which seem to be characteristic of the overall linguistic picture (see, for example, Thelander, 1979). Once again, neither here there is an absolute dichotomy between the two linguistic entities, a fact which is reflected in the use of the term 'regional standard', which, as I said above, refers to various syntheses of dialect and standard features.
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What basis, then, can Blom and Gumperz have had for their particular interpretation of the linguistic situation in Hemnes? Does their characterization of the Hemnes speakers' discrete switching strategies have any basis at all in Norwegian linguistic reality? By taking the concept of ' m o d e l ' as a point of departure, we can probably achieve a better understanding of the methodological errors the two researchers have made in their description of this community. My suggestion is that Blom and Gumperz have constructed and described a theoretical model of the Hemnes speech community, a model that is based on certain theories concerning the sociolinguistic structure of bi- and multilingual societies, combined with a general knowledge of Norwegian social conditions. In scientific analysis, such models can fulfil an important role in providing a reduced picture of reality, which can serve a useful heuristic function by contributing to the development of a simplified schematic representation of complex empirical patterns (see, for example, Weizenbaum, 1976: 149). In Blom and Gumperz' study, however, this theoretical model has unfortunately been ascribed empirical status. The model, that is, has been treated as if it were on a par with reality, and there is no real attempt in their account to differentiate between the two different stages of the analytical process. We therefore have to question very seriously the extent to which this model can be directly valid for any study of the Norwegian linguistic situation. True, there are certain basic dimensions of the model which can be said to reflect some of the general idealized norms and socio-semantic structures associated with a Norwegian linguistic reality. On the other side, however, the model contains so many essentially erroneous and defective assertions and postulates about the relationship between dialect and spoken standard in Norway that it needs radical changes before it can be accepted for direct application to the study of linguistic situations in real-life Norwegian communities.
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