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Wolla I swear this is typical for the conversational style of adolescents in multiethnic areas in Oslo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2009

Toril Opsahl
Toril Opsahl*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1102, Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. toril.opsahl@iln.uio.no
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Abstract

This paper argues that the conversational style of adolescents in multiethnic areas in Oslo is characterized by an extended degree of epistemic focus and expressions pointing explicitly towards the news value of utterances. The linguistic traits contributing to this notion is a set of discourse markers where wallah, or as it is often referred to in Norwegian; wolla (orig. Arab. ‘I swear by Allah’), seems to be prominent, together with Norwegian counterparts such as sverg, jeg sverger and helt ærlig (‘swear’, ‘I swear’ and ‘quite honestly’). Equipped with methodological insights from Interactional linguistics, the distribution and discourse functions of the markers are analysed in a corpus of conversations between adolescents growing up in multiethnic areas (the Upus/Oslo-corpus) and compared to another larger, representative corpus of modern Oslo dialect (the NoTa/Oslo-corpus). The discourse markers in question are also discussed in light of grammaticalization processes.

Keywords

conversational stylediscourse markersgrammaticalizationmultiethnolect
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 32 , Special Issue 2: Sociolinguistics , December 2009 , pp. 221 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2009

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