Language practices in superdiverse Oslo:A staging of masculinity ?

• Main Author: Harchaoui, Sarah
• Other Authors: Centre de Linguistique en Sorbonne (CeLiSo), Sorbonne Université (SU), Akurereyri University
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2017
• Subjects: Contemporary Urban Vernacular; Norwegian sociolinguistics; masculine speech style; [SCCO.LING]Cognitive science/Linguistics; Akureyri; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-04002265

The Oslo case study is particularly interesting to analyse in demographic terms since Oslo represents the fastest growing city in Europe where much of the country’s growth is due to immigration (Urban Europe 2014). As a part of my research, most of my data come from the UPUS-project (‘Linguistic Development in Urban Environments’) conducted between 2006 and 2008 in Oslo, Norway. The corpus consists of video-recorded interviews and peer-group conversational data from adolescents all born and raised in the Eastern parts of Oslo, which are mainly made up of third world immigrants and their descendants (respectively 34% and 44% in 2008). According to the results of UPUS’s initial works (Svendsen & Røyneland 2008 Quist & Svendsen 2010 Nortier & Svendsen 2015), a specific way of speaking Norwegian labelled as ‘Norwegian multiethnolectal style’, ‘Kebab-Norwegian’ or recently ‘Contemporary Urban Vernacular’ has been confirmed and accurately located in the Eastern parts of Oslo. Non-European borrowing and innovative verb placement are features which are regularly put forward to describe this speech style (Opsahl & Nistov, 2010). So far, researchers’ attention has mainly been focused on age and ethnic criteria in order to explain the use of heterogeneous units but also to deconstruct a cause-effect pattern. Nevertheless, it seems clear that a one-by-one relation can be made between the activation of Norwegian multiethnolectal style and a masculine staging of practices. Most of the respondents have expressed their affiliation with hip hop movement inherited from American street culture, which price masculine attitudes both in daily lifestyle. The purpose of my talk is thus to discuss the social meanings of those language practices in the light of the gender criterion. Is the Norwegian multiethnolectal style restricted to male respondents ? What makes this so-called ‘masculine’ speech style attractive for the speakers of superdiverse areas not only in Oslo but in the whole Europe ?