Urban Talk & Text (completed)

Urban Talk & Text investigates language, youth and identity in the city.

About the project

Urban Talk & Text zooms in on Oslo and surrounding regions, and is particularly concerned with

  • the status of contemporary urban vernaculars today
  • the spread and development over time
  • the ways these speech styles are portrayed, employed and perceived in various modalities, in conversations, in social and printed media, as well as in novels, TV series and films 

Objectives

The primary objective of Urban Talk & Text is to contribute new knowledge on the social life of contemporary urban speech styles.

Background

Urban Talk & Text employs a multiple methodological approach, including Citizen Sociolinguistics, that is, engaging lay people in doing sociolinguistic research. 

Duration 

Autumn 2020 - 2023.

Collaboration and Networks

Financing

Urban Speech is partly funded by the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265.

Sub-projects

  • Samantha Goodchild: Urban multilingual spaces: Oslo in the 2020s. A collaborative intergenerational sociolinguistics project
  • Rafael Lomeu Gomes: Speech styles of young adults in urban spaces in Norway: Continuities and disruptions
  • Gavin Lamb: Youth ecocultural identity at the nexus of Oslo's multilingual, digital and urban landscapes

Related projects

Youths Speak Back

Workshops and Events

Urban Talk & Text organised a workshop on Citizen Sociolinguistics the 3. and 4. of November 2020. Program and presentations can be found in the list of previous events at Multiling. 

The research group organised a panel at Sociolinguistic Symposium 24 in Ghent, July 2022: Recontextualisation of contemporary urban vernaculars - crossing binaries empirically, ideologically and methodologically.

Media (selected)

Selected publications

  • Mesthrie, Raj, Toril Opsahl & Unn Røyneland (2021). Contesting Stereotypes: Language, Body and Belonging – Northern and Southern perspectives. In Blackwood & Røyneland (eds.) Spaces of Multilingualism. Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism. Routledge, 51-72. (Open access).　
  • Cutler, Cecelia & Unn Røyneland (eds.) (2018). Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication. Cambridge University Press.
  • Lomeu Gomes, Rafael & Bente A. Svendsen (2023). Minoritized youth language in Norwegian media discourse: Surfacing the abyssal line. In Bassey Antia and Sinfree Makoni (eds.), Southernizing Sociolinguistics. Colonialism, Racism, and Patriarchy in Language in the Global South. Taylor & Francis
  • Opsahl, Toril (2018). Welcome to the city where dialects aren't pretty? On some developmental processes in urban multiethnic areas in Oslo, Norway, In Thorsten Burkard & Markus Hundt (ed.),  Sprachmischung - Mischsprachen. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil gegenseitiger Sprachbeeinflussung.  Peter Lang Publishing Group.  ISBN 978-3-631-74389-8.  kapittel.  s 83 - 98
  • Røyneland, Unn (2018). Virtually Norwegian: Negotiating language and identity on YouTube. In Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication. Cambridge University Press, 145-168.
  • Svendsen, Bente A. & Samantha Goodchild 2021.How We Talk about Language: Exploring Citizen Sociolinguistics. Rymes, Betsy, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2020. 201 pp. 1st edition, ISBN: 9781108725965: https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12511
  • Svendsen, Bente A. 2022. Contemporary urban speech styles. Norway. In P. Kerswill & H. Wiese (eds.), Urban contact dialects and language change: Insights from the global North and South. London: Routledge.
Published Oct. 20, 2020 5:29 PM - Last modified Feb. 6, 2026 10:37 AM

Contact

Bente Ailin Svendsen (PI)

Participants

Detailed list of participants