Rural speech is often denigrated, but how might it also be valuable? How might rural economies benefit from their linguistic diversity through tourism? In this third and final installment of our “Is Talk Cheap?” series on language and value, Kate and Ariana interview Dr. Thea Strand about a highly valorized dialect of rural Norway that won a national popularity contest and is increasingly being used commercially. Dr. Strand gives us some background on how the political and cultural history of Norway has produced a deep appreciation of dialect diversity and an ethos against language standardization. We talk about how the Valdres dialect is now used commercially for tourists in diverse places, from wayfinding signs on ski trails to advertising car washes at gas stations. Learn the significance of a single vowel in advertising a festival for fermented fish! We discuss hyperlocal language use, language change over time, and why some kinds of linguistic difference are available to use in marketing when others are not. In the last part of the episode, Thea tells us about her new research with Michael Wroblewski on another aspect of this rural economy: the decline of transhumance (the seasonal movement of grazing livestock) among local family farmers. Residents lament the resulting reforestation and their changing landscape alongside their changing dialect, underscoring how people experience economic transformations through landscape and language.

Thea Strand is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her primary research is sited in rural Valdres, Norway, examining language and political economy, broadly construed. She has studied changes in linguistic structure, value, and ideologies surrounding the distinctive Valdres dialect since the late 2000s. Her current project focuses on the deeply intertwined environmental, cultural, and linguistic effects of tourism development and declining transhumant farming in Valdres’ mountain areas.

Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn Graber [Link] and Ariana Gunderson [Link]. Edited and mixed by Richard Nance.

References from our conversation with Thea Strand:

Strand, Thea. 2024. A Winning Dialect: Inventing Linguistic Tradition in Rural Norway. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges.” Social Science Information 16, no. 6 (1977): 645–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847701600601.

Valdres Nature and Culture Park: https://www.valdres.no/

Rakfisk Festival: https://www.rakfisk.no/