Palmettofighter Newbie United States Joined 6132 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 1 of 9 10 July 2008 at 4:56am | IP Logged |
After much research I have found out from one of my family members that my Great Great Grandfather immigrated here from Kleppe, Norway. Kleppe is not too far away from Trondheim. I know there are some Norwegians and such on here so I have come with the question of what Norwegian dialect is traditionally spoken near Trondheim and how is it different from the Bergen dialect.
Thankyou so much in advance.
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Eduard Decaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6025 days ago 166 posts - 170 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Dutch*, NorwegianC1, Swedish, Danish, English, German, ItalianB1, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, French Studies: Portuguese
| Message 2 of 9 10 July 2008 at 11:37am | IP Logged |
I checked on the map to find Kleppe, but it is pretty far from Trondheim. Kleppe is closest to Stavanger and on the dialect map of Norway you can find a text read out by an inhabitant of Time, just a few kilometres away. Check out what it sounds like: http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/nos/?nosid=nos18004
PS: this text may not represent the dialect entirely, as it is a standard text which is read aloud with the local 'accent', thereby changing the most likely dialect words but not adding new words. To me (I'm Dutch) it sounds pretty much like someone from Stavanger.
Check out other pronunciations here: http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/nos/nos_kart.html
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Palmettofighter Newbie United States Joined 6132 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 3 of 9 10 July 2008 at 11:58am | IP Logged |
Thankyou very much. Are these dialects and things still spoken? Or would I be better of just learning standard Norwegian?
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taKen Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mindofthelinguist.woRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6117 days ago 176 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Dutch, French Studies: German, Icelandic
| Message 4 of 9 10 July 2008 at 5:23pm | IP Logged |
These dialects are still spoken, but that doesn't mean that it'll be easy to learn them if you're going to try to do so from without Norway. It would probably be a better idea to learn standard Norwegian, since you really have to live with the people speaking the dialect if you wish to pursue it--especially when it concerns a language as small as Norwegian.
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Eduard Decaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6025 days ago 166 posts - 170 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Dutch*, NorwegianC1, Swedish, Danish, English, German, ItalianB1, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, French Studies: Portuguese
| Message 5 of 9 12 July 2008 at 1:28pm | IP Logged |
Spoken Norwegian is quite a task to learn from abroad. Local dialects stand strong and they usually aren't stigmatising. When it comes to learning Norwegian abroad, stick to taKen's advice and learn 'ordinary', standard Norwegian based on the Bokmål writing style. As I started to learn Norwegian (when still living in the Netherlands), I decided to stick to this kind of 'standard television Norwegian'. This has helped me a lot when it comes to spelling and grammar since my knowledge of Norwegian wasn't yet 'contaminated' by all the different ways of saying and writing things compared to standard Bokmål. And if you want, you can always try to learn the local dialect for conversing.
Btw, how long ago did your ancestors leave Norway?
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Palmettofighter Newbie United States Joined 6132 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 6 of 9 15 July 2008 at 1:35pm | IP Logged |
My Great Great grandfather grew up on the Kjornstad / Skogn farm in Nord Trondheim county and then left for the United States sometime in the 1890's
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Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6620 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish
| Message 7 of 9 10 July 2009 at 3:32pm | IP Logged |
I don't know about Kleppe or Kjornstad, but I do know Skogn. I live right near there and take the train from Skogn station every day. It used to be a township, but now is a part of Levanger township. It's in Nord-Trøndelag county. (Trondheim is a city in Sør-Trøndelag county.)
As for the dialect: The written dialect of this region is almost exclusively bokmål. Very few people use nynorsk, mostly just some older people. The spoken dialect is harder to describe. In general, you could say that words that end in e, like a lot of verbs, tend to lose that final e sound. R's are rolled. L-sounds tend to be "thick". N-sounds are kind of like the n in onion. (I forget what that's called at the moment.) The pronouns jeg, deg, meg, etc become æ, dæ, and mæ. The verb er is shortened to e. All this shortening of words leads to it sounding kind of run-together. If you're not used to it, it sounds kind of messy.
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cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5838 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian
| Message 8 of 9 17 July 2009 at 11:06pm | IP Logged |
This is a very sweet story!
Why don't you try to find out if you have any living relatives in Norway? They might be quite excited to hear from you. My family heard from American distant relatives once, and everybody thought it was fantastic. If you find a name you can just google them, or check facebook.
Everybody in Norway, under 60 can at the very least get by in English. Many are completely fluent. The previous posters who've said that standard Norwegian is most sensible are completely right. You shouldn't worry about the dialect at this point.
You might find that your relatives don't live in that area at all any more, but migrated to a bigger city. If you just want to visit the place that the ancestors come from, you don't need to speak Norwegian for that...
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