Scandinavian Linguistics - Historical

NORD1101 includes Old Norse, history of language from the older period, history of language from the recent period and Dialectology: The objective of this course is to give the students a foundation of understanding the development of Norwegian and other Scandinavian languages, and enabling students to gain something by reading Old Norse literature. The course includes an overview of the phonological, morphological and sentential structure development from the first Scandinavian languages up until 1500, as well as an overview of the language structure in Old Norse which enables the student to read an easy, unfamiliar text with help of a dictionary and an outline of Old Norse declinations. A reading of a normalized old norse prose text is also included in this component of the course.
Language of the recent period: The aim of this component is to give students insight and a deeper understanding of the interaction between written and spoken language - an important principles in language planning and the forces governing the development of the Norwegian language. The component includes an overview of recent language history (mainly after 1814). In addition, there will be readings of philological documents which will shed light on and deepen the debates on Norwegian language policy.
Dialectology: The objective of this component is to give the student an overview of the traditional Norwegian dialects, and knowledge of their historical background. The component includes an outline of geographical dialect variants, and the main division of Norwegian dialects, and a study of dialect samples from the various main regions.

At the completion of the course the student is expected to be able to give a detailed account of the main developmental features in Norwegian from the earliest days up until today. In this context, students are expected to understand(translate) and explain the grammatical features of an unknown normalized prose text in Old Norse. Students must also demonstrate substantial knowledge of the divisional criteria of Norwegian dialects, so that students can correctly identify unknown dialect samples.

Lectures and group work including writing exercises. There will be supervision through the course of the semester.

There will also be a separate course in Danish. This course will be cancelled if the Department's economic situation does not allow it.

Compulsory activity: Approved written assignment. The assignment's extent should be up to five pages. There will be oral/written assessment (approved/not approved) of the paper.

Students may bring an Old Norse dictionary, an outline of Old Norse declination and a list of important dates in the history of language to the exam.

The students must write one of the written assignments on the language courses on the basic level (i.e. NORD1101 and NORD1102) in "nynorsk" and one in "bokmål".

The students must write one of the three exams on the basic level (i.e. the exam in NORD1101, NORD1102 and NORD 1104) in "nynorsk" and one in "bokmål".