Acceso usuarios
Peter Trudgill
Norwegians have for decades been among the best sociolinguists in the worid. All Norwegians have had their consciousness about the relationship between language and society raised by the recent history ofthe Norwegian language. It is not surprising that sociolinguistic research was being carried out in Norway long before the term itself had been invented, and before linguists in most other countries had begun to consider the importance of societal factors in linguistic research. Modern Norwegian sociolinguistics äs such, however, can be said to have begun in the early 1970s. In the 1970s, most of the topics that come under the heading of sociolinguistics were already being practiced by Norwegians. The only major gap in work from this period appears to be in discourse and conversation analysis, and in anthropological linguistics and the ethnography of speaking. Given the long tradition of work in social dialectology, much of the strength of Norwegian sociolinguistics lies at the more linguistic end of work in sociolinguistics. Norwegian sociolinguists have also been particularly notable for the work they have carried out into language anddialect contact phenomena, and for the way in which they have always been keen to apply the results of their research to the solution of real-world problems.
