NORWEGIAN INFLUENCE

The development of the Kven language in the past centuries was parallel to the Finnish language. As the Finnish language was undergoing a shift towards the modern-day written language, Kven went through a similar process, albeit it was heavily influenced by Norwegian grammar and vocabulary.

Upon researching the degree of Norwegian influence among Kven speakers, we notice a gradual Norwegianization of the Kven language in more modern speech. Perhaps as more people grew up using Norwegian as their dominant language and acquire Kven later in life, their speech, syntax and vocabulary become heavily Norwegianized.

This page will be dedicated to the influence of Norwegian language on the Kven langauge.

Syntax

As mentioned earlier, Norwegianized syntax in Kven is often observed among younger speakers or among those who have acquired the language later in life. However, due to the flexibility of word order in Kven, such changes do not necessarily result in ungrammatical sentences. We will illustrate this with a few spoken examples from the NRK podcast Kaffipraatti.

Let's unpack the first sentence from episode 5 with Norwegian and English translation below.

Jos se olis ollu semmoinen samfynnin kuurto niin ko se on nyt, (. . .) sitte mie luulen ette mieki olisin sannu sen kielen.

Hvis det hadde vært en sånn samfunnsstøtte som det er nå, (. . .) så tror jeg at jeg også hadde kunne dette språket.

If there had been such support from society like today, (. . .) I believe I would have been able to speak the language.

As you can see, the structure Jos se olis ollu mirrors the Norwegian subjunctive Hvis det hadde vært / hadde det vært. The use of the word sitte, which introduces an adverbial clause or expresses the result, functions in the same way in both languages.

Here is another sentence from episode 1.

Ja mie ymmärsin, ette niitä töitä koko ajan sai. Vaikka minula sillä tavala ei olu koulutusta siihen, niin sai koko ajan töitä. 

Og jeg forsto at man kunne få disse jobbene hele tiden. Selv om jeg på den måten ikke hadde utdanning til det, (så) fikk jeg jobber hele tiden. 

And I understood that one could get these jobs all the time. Though I, in a way, didn't have education in that, I could get jobs all the time.

This is another example of how some Kven sentences are word-for-word translation of Norwegian. Though that is not to say the Kven language is just Finnish with Norwegian syntax, because the degree of Norwegianization varies from speakers to speakers. The examples above merely show how flexible the Kven language is as opposed to the more fixed and rigid Finnish grammar.

Pronunciation

In addition to syntax, the pronunciation of Kven is also heavily influenced by Norwegian.

Kven tends to sound softer, mainly due to the more aspirated hard consonants. Double consonants like kk, pp, tt are pronounced differently compared to single consonants, but the distinctions are sometimes less noticeable compared to Finnish.

Something noteworthy is that Norwegian loanwords sometimes retain their original vowel sounds, rather than the corresponding vowel sounds in Kven. Through in these cases, both pronunciations are acceptable.

kultuuri - kyltyyri

turismi - tyrismi

motoori - muuturi

informasuuni - informasjuuni/ informašuuni

Vocabulary

Norwegian is the main source of loanwords in Kven. A loanword is a borrowed term from another language, and is contrased by calques (loan translations).

Let's first look at some Kven words that are adopted from Norwegian.

* the suffix -eerata corresponds to the Norwegian verb ending -ere

Interestingly, some loanwords come from languages other than Norwegian or Swedish. Here are a few examples.

Calque

A calque (loan translation) is a word or a phrase borrowed from one language into another by literally translating its individual parts. There are a lot of calques in Kven, even if the direct word-for-word translation doesn't seem to make sense. Here are a few examples:

Partial Calque

A partial calque is a loan translation that only translates some parts of a foreign word or phrase but keeping the other parts unchanged. The English calque apple strudel (from German Apfelstrudel) is a great example, with one part being directly translated, whilst retaining the German word strudel.

Here are some of many partial calques in Kven.