Svorsk () or Svorska () is a

portmanteau In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together.

of '' svensk(a)'' 'Swedish' and '' norsk(a)'' 'Norwegian' to describe a mixture of the Swedish and

Norwegian language Norwegian ( ) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken mainly in Norway, where it is an official language. Along with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a dialect continuum of more or less mutually intelli ...

s. It could be translated as Sworwegian in English. The term ''svorsk'' is used to describe the language of someone (almost exclusively a Swedish or Norwegian person) who mixes words from his or her native tongue with the other language. The phenomenon is common, especially in light of the close business and trade ties between the two countries and the

mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelli ...

between the two languages, the latter in its turn being due to the common ancestry and parallel development of both Norwegian and Swedish from

Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...

(see ''

North Germanic languages The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also r ...

''). The term originates from the 1970s. Individual Swedish

loanword A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

s and phrases that are assimilated into a language, including Norwegian, are called '' svecisms'' (). This trend has been ongoing in Norwegian since the dissolution of the Dano-Norwegian Union in 1814; however, it gained momentum substantially after the dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden in 1905 and has been an ongoing phenomenon of Norwegian linguistics, and still is. Indeed, the prominent Norwegian linguist Finn-Erik Vinje characterizes this influx since

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

as a breaking wave.«Der lå vi et folk bag, et andet berømmeligt rige» Om svesismer i unionstiden 1814–1905
by Finn-Erik Vinje of the

Norwegian Language Council The Language Council of Norway (, ) is the administrative body of the Norwegian state on language issues. It regulates the two written forms of the Norwegian language: Bokmål and Nynorsk. It was established in 2005 and replaced the Norwegian Lan ...

. ''Page visited December 19, 2007'' There's no one specific vocabulary used in Svorsk; versions range from borderline joke speech (replacing random vowels in the person's main language) to knowing and using a reasonable set of core words from the other language (such as ''lita'', ''ursäkta'', and ''kolla'' from Swedish; and for example ''hengsler'', ''pils'', and ''potet'' from Norwegian, among countless others).

References

{{Swedish language Norwegian language Swedish language North Germanic languages Code-switching Macaronic language

See also

References