Dialects in western Europe: a balanced picture of language death, innovation, and change*

This thematic issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language addresses the question of whether dialects in western Europe are dying. Can dialects still be a medium of communication in our industrialized and increasingly urbanized societies? Is there a place for dialects in a globalizing world? And what kind of dialect do we speak right now and shall we be speaking in the near future? In what way do our present day dialects di¤er from the dialects of the — in some cases very recent — past? The cases presented in this issue do not cover every country of western Europe, but we hope that both the geographical spread of the selected countries and regions and the diversity they represent with respect to their linguistic, political, and socioeconomic past and present shed light on the similarities and di¤erences in the sociolinguistic evolution of dialect use across this part of the continent. As far as dialect vitality is concerned, the first country that is presented in the volume, Norway, constitutes a very special case. In ‘‘Dialects in Norway: catching up with the rest of Europe?,’’ Unn Røyneland explains what makes the Norwegian language situation quite unique, even today: the positive attitudes that are generally held toward dialects, the ease and openness with which nonstandard dialects are used both in formal/public and in informal/private domains, and the huge amount of dialect diversity. All of these factors are related to the lack of a strong national spoken standard and to some extent also to the bewildering variation across the written standards. The omnipresence of dialect use in Norwegian society shows that dialects have not become functionally devalued at all. But Norway appears to be catching up with the rest of Europe to some extent with respect to structural changes a¤ecting its dialects. The predominant tendency is one of regional leveling. Displaying regional a‰liation and identity has become more important than displaying a strictly local a‰liation. Urban dialects appear to play a prominent role in these processes: they determine both horizontal and vertical leveling