Talk about yourself: How to say "I" in Norwegian

 Norwegian has a lot of dialectal variation, and one way this is particulary apparent is in the many variants that exist for the pronoun "I". As we will see this word has 13 variants in Norwegian.

And yes, you'll hear (most) of these variants when you travel around Norway!

Why so many variants

So what's the reason for all these variants? I think there are two reasons:

1. Dialects are cool in Norway! We don't speak a national standard variety, but are proud of speaking our dialects
2. Norwegian dialects originate from both Old West Norse and Old East Norse, or to say it another way: the boundary between those Old Norse variants divides present-day Norway. The mountain range dividing Norway in east and west has also divided the dialects into two main varieties.

Other languages in Europe

Other languages in Europe also have dialectal variants for the word "I", notably German, sporting about 7 variants: ich, ech, aich, äich, isch, i, and ick.

Swedish has 4: jag, ja, jau, and jå.

Old Norse 

The Old Norse form was ek, inherited from Proto-Germanic *ek. Old East Norse developed iak, and this became Danish and Norwegian jeg, and the Swedish jag.

The change to iak followed a regular sound change in Old East Norse. But I think it's interesting that the Proto-Slavic pronoun had a similar change: *(j)ãzъ which developed from Proto-Baltic-Slavic *ēź-, adding an initial "j". So most of the Slavic languages today have ja which (coincidentally?) is the same as the Swedish form ja. A coincidence? Maybe Old East Norse people had contact with the Slavic people and they influenced each other?

The 5 main dialectal areas in Norway

So the dialects in Norway fall into either the Western or the Eastern main "buckets" - they developed the pronoun from either Old West Norse (ek) or Old East Norse (iak). In addition we can separate out the Northern dialects that are quite distinct from the other Western variants because of the geographical distance. We have the Trønder dialect, which is in the middle of Norway where these three main variants meet. We also have the Southern dialects on the coast from Risør to Lindesnes, with influence from east and west and also from Danish.

SNL.no: Skjekkeland 2015 / Christiansen 1969 Lisens: CC BY SA 3.0

Northern dialects

Most common is æ, but other variants include e, eg, æ, æg, je, ei

Northern dialects are part of the Old West Norse tradition, but the two last forms originated in eastern dialects that were brought to the area by immigration.

Trønder

Most common is æ. Other variants: æ, æg, æi, æig, eig.

Western dialects

Most common is eg, but also e and i.

Eastern dialects

Most common is jæi. Other variants: je, jæ, e

Generally the Western dialects begin with a vowel, and the Eastern ones begin with the consonant "j". For instance East Norwegian dialects north of Oslo is je, dropping the last letter, but keeping the initial "j". This is also similar to the Swedish pronoun which is usually either jag or ja.

Southern dialects

æ(g) or e(g), and in this case being a variant of the western dialects.

Conclusion

All the dialect variants generally fall into either the Old West Norse tradition or the Old East Norse one. It's interesting that the common western dialect pronoun is (almost) the same as the Proto Indoeuropean form *éǵh.

The only other languages that have preserved the original eg are Faroese and Icelandic.

Sources:

Store norske leksikon

https://spraksida.no/malmerker/

wiktionary.org

University of Tromsø

A language learner's forum