The Norwegian language has undergone considerable change in the last 180 years. In this book, Gjert Kristoffersen, arguably the best Norwegian phonologist, provides readers with an original analysis of the ways in which the sounds and meanings of competing languages may change and evolve.

A the end of the fourteenth century, Norway, having previously been an independent kingdom, became by conquest a province of Denmark and remained so for three centuries. In1814, as part of the fall-out from the Napoleonic wars, the country became a largely independent nation within the monarchy of Sweden. By this time, however, Danish had become the language of government, commerce, and education, as well as of the middle and upper classes. Nationalistic Norwegians sought to reestablish native identity by creating and promulgating a new language based partly on rural dialects and partly on...

This handbook presents the first systematic account of corpus phonology - the employment of corpora, especially purpose-built phonological corpora of spoken language, for studying speakers' and listeners' acquisition and knowledge of the sound system of their native languages and the principles underlying those systems. The field combines methods and theoretical approaches from phonology, both diachronic and synchronic, phonetics, corpus linguistics, speech technology, information technology and computer science, mathematics and statistics.
The book is divided into four parts: the first...