Aagaard-Nilsen’s latest book contains a large number of local words and expressions. Many of them are disappearing from the dialect. The words are arranged in alphabetical order, and space is devoted to word explanations as well as sentence examples. The book is also richly illustrated with pictures – both new and old photographs, as well as some illustrations.
The author, who himself has a professional background as a lecturer at Svolvær upper secondary school, believes it is important to take care of the rich language heritage from our ancestors. Today, the dialects are strongly influenced by the national “standard language” through the mass media, literature and other modern forms of communication. In this way, the local dialect words are watered down more and more, and are in danger of being lost.
– From my upbringing in the 50s out on Å in Lofoten, I was lucky enough to experience what I would call the lush language of everyday, oral speech. There lived people who did not take themselves too seriously. There was not so much “goods and gold”, and for most people everything was on the same level, as it was otherwise in our part of the country at the time, the author writes in the foreword to the book.
– The people out there on Å and in Lofoten and Northern Norway in general, in their linguistic spontaneity, were almost like “artists”. In day-to-day work and activities, the words came without “anything in between”. The words could often be quite crass, imaginative and enigmatic; expressions of power wrapped in so-called understatements. Words from barns, fishing boats, oak arbors, from the hayfield, from working life, yes, from daily life. The color blobs of words were, as Knut Hamsun put it, “as mad as art”.
From my upbringing in the exciting fishing village of Å, from my childhood and adolescence, many things were perceived and “stored” in my memory, writes Nils Aagaard-Nilsen at the beginning of his collection of words.
Photo: Eilertsen Forlag
