Ethnolects in Northern Norway

While much research on ethnolects is concerned with urban contexts, this article focuses on ethnolects as a rural multilinguistic practice. The analysis combines macro and micro perspectives on language ideologies in language encounters in Northern Norway in order to shed light on the old, rural ethnolects in this region, namely the ethnolects of Nordreisa municipality in county Troms. In Northern Norway, ethnolects have developed in language-shift contexts from Sámi/Kven to Norwegian. This article will show that despite national negligence of the Northern multilingualism and the ethnolects, people in the region still recognize and use ethnolect features. The analysis focuses on ‘disagreement’ in prenominal demonstratives, and it will be shown that people use this ethnolect feature side by side with more standard-like features.