Foto: Erik Hovland

Who do you think you are

If I thought I was someone before I came to Norway, like a character in an ancient proverb I have undertaken a kind of unwilling, ungracious humbling.

Av E.V. Crowe
Award-winning British playwright and screenwriter living in Dale in Sunnfjord.


Publisert 18.12.2024
Sist oppdatert 18.12.2024

If I used my voice in Britain, anywhere, a bus, a library, a playpark, it would immediately tell a story. A rough one, an approximate one, but a story that mainly works in my favour.

I have lived in other countries before I lived in Norway. I have learned other languages. French forever at school, Italian, Spanish. I’m no expert, but I got by, achieved grades and degree level academic qualifications. I read somewhere once that to assimilate fully is an act of psychopathy. And I don’t think I am anywhere near that, I hope, but I get what they mean. Who the hell am I in Norwegian?

Sometimes in Norwegian, I am a grown woman re-fashioned as a not too bright child. I am a child once more in my own life- navigating systems, songs, customs, pronunciations, traditions, social politics. And it is hard for me to tell if I am presenting as slow and child-like or it is a characterisation simply offered to most outsiders, easily imposed. Sometimes I watch other outsiders struggle to communicate - I watch their effort and their intelligence wane against the wall of miscommunication. And sometimes I watch people who have studied more diligently than me or been here longer, but I feel sad because in their first language they are so funny and smart and in this new personification they are more direct and complete. They are the B-side of the album. There are fewer gaps for deliberate opaqueness, or an entertaining pause or a twinkle in the eye.

When I use my voice in Norwegian, it is usually in fact to children, my own and their friends. Other people’s children have in a strange way been my teachers. They have given me confidence to ask questions and make mistakes, they have worked around the gaps and laughed at my overacted jokes. I will be forever grateful to them (and their kind parents) and push myself and my language learning to keep pace with their lives. Although in all likelihood, their English will surpass my Norwegian before they are in their teens. And of course we say Norwegian, but here in Fjaler we mean largely nynorsk, a minority stake language in the nation’s new ish nationhood. I was mocked recently by a visitor from Oslo for my use of nynorsk. He said the word vatn back to me in a ‘ye old ye’ country voice. And did a sort of half dance as he said it. I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or flattered that me speaking nynorsk was worthy of a sort of Oslo joke and me being irritated back meant that I had become more nynorsk-y than I realised.

I am occasionally mocked for my use of language in general, which I find hard because I feel I could obviously rip most people’s English apart in seconds if I wanted to, like a shark on the attack, but I don’t because I respect the endeavour and am afraid to lose the chance to communicate with ease occasionally. It is like eating a bowl of crisps, to get a joke in in your own language sometimes and for someone to laugh. It is really nice. I am very grateful to the few who still let me speak English with them. But after about ten in the evening anyway, even the very best English speakers tire and unless I want to go home, I have to stay alert and switch fully to nynorsk. 

Learning Norwegian in one of the few areas in Norway that has a nynorsk school, means that most incomers are learning nynorsk rather than bokmål. It takes most people a while to realise this, myself included. That we have become minority stakeholders in a minority language in a large country with a small population, in a small village with a small population. The specificity can feel quite dazzling, hard to get your head round. And of course if you learn nynorsk, really you must parallel learn bokmål too because often letters, bills, communications, novels, children's books are in bokmål. So you start to do the double -think that most West Coast Norwegians do easily. Some people start their sentences in one Norwegian language and finish in the other. This is considered a happy mixing, but if it comes from an outsider it can appear as just incorrect or worse still ignorance or worse still laziness especially if writing a quick message on text or email. I try to be so correct in English, and now I’m that terrible typo person. It’s impossible to check every message carefully, walking in the rain carrying a child responding quickly to a message about a jacket left somewhere.

One of the hardest things to do is to help your child learn to read using phonetics, in a language that might easily be your fifth language. To imagine that you have got the pronunciation correct enough in your own mouth to confidently encourage a child to offer up theirs in the pursuit of reading. This is actually incredibly difficult, largely because it’s easy to feel that not only are you getting it wrong, but that you are potentially holding back your own child by your own learning journey. I have spent many hours pre-studying my child’s homework so that when he asks for help, I can act as though it is clear and perfectly do-able. I don’t want to make it look like hard work in front of them otherwise they might lose the energy to do it at all. Helping them pronounce an unexpected difficult word in the reading homework, while you yourself are doing mental gymnastics to nail it and translate it, all while giving off supportive, calm energy is the kind of performance worthy of an Oscar. And when you say well done at the end, you mean it really for the both of you.

Two opportunities occurred recently that I would consider a kind of a break-through, involving the chance to be creative directly in nynorsk. One started because of a play for the stage I was commissioned to write by Teater Vestland. I was asked by the dramaturg to try writing the English speaking character’s speech in my level of Norwegian. As I was doing it, I really wanted to weep. I suddenly felt all of the character’s shame and pain and identity crisis, but equally that in the story her specific fictional situation is more dangerous because she can’t use language easily to defend herself. This made me think about how as a writer (mainly for UK Theatre and TV, film, radio but also a grateful recipient of the Statens kunstnerstipend and Teater Vestland theatre commission) I don’t always have all of the English words in my brain, available to use. In fact, most writers hang around with the same syntax or version of English they like best. I can often hear when someone has a new boyfriend or girlfriend because new words suddenly get introduced into their vocabulary. But anyway, I realised that everyone has self imposed or otherwise limitations on language and it doesn’t have to be a barrier to making creative work, where essentially you are always free within certain limitations. So, when Rakel Solheim at the Jakob Sande - senter for forteljekunst asked me to curate a week at the Sandesenter I felt that making new work in nynorsk with people also new to nynorsk could be exciting and it would push my own use of language to the limit - meetings, teaching, emails – everything in nynorsk, but that I would put the emphasis on what we want to say rather than any real constraints on how.

This happened in tandem with a thought I had while I was on my hands and knees on the floor in the Fjaler library sweating, still in full waterproof rain gear looking for a new nynorsk book for my child. And I wondered if it might be an opportunity to fish out the nynorsk books in the library for a week and put them in a separate display so we could see the options more easily or at least while standing up. And then I thought it would be good if more of the parents of young children, everyone learning at the same time, could just have some new nynorsk children's books or poetry to have at home while learning. And thanks to Rakel, the library and the publishers, all of this magically happened. And thanks to the adult students at the Språkskule (from all over - Congo, Ukraine, Afghanistan) in Dale and the teachers there who supported the poetry sessions, we managed all together to write a lot of poems in a few sessions and then read them out on a Saturday afternoon.

What is the point in writing a poem in nynorsk one might ask? Isn’t it better to be able to just learn say the basics of life / work and hurry up and get a job? I suppose I feel I’ve maybe understood that both are necessary. That you need the chance to say something personal and specific to you (like writing a poem that riffs off Ruth Lillegraven’s famous ‘Eg er’ poem), as well as covering all the solid information, grammar, vocabulary stuff. It is the habit of the host nation (not just Norway) to feel that you are always giving to the incomer, forgetting that they have the capacity and often already are, giving something back in return. That if you can grab hold of something that sits at the core of you as a person through a creative act, then you can grow with the new language, offer the language itself new energy, new voice, new life, rather than the new language being a static piece of equipment you carry around with your old self for practical purposes. It can actually be quite painful to change linguistically after a certain age – I have massive empathy for the older students taking their time to weave themselves into this new nynorsk paradigm. Somehow it can help to sit in a room and say ‘Eg er’ out loud one by one. It’s choosing the word for your poem which is creative, and saying that choice in front of people, being sympathetically witnessed. You can feel your heart beating, and your voice shaking, and then you realise you did it, and in a tiny way you are remaking yourself in the place you find yourself right now, not in the memories of the past or dreams of the future but where we actually are. Physically something happens, you are allowing yourself to grow… som ei plante kan du føle at nytt liv utfaldar seg. Det er ganske kult.

Eg skreiv eit dikt på nynorsk også, for å sjå om det var mogleg:

Når skal nynorsk elske meg?

Eg elskar nynorsk, men når skal nynorsk elske meg?
Eg elskar nynorsk kvar dag. Eg elskar nynorsk på legekontoret, på skulen når eg snakkar om barn, 
på politistasjonen i Bergen når eg hentar dokument, 
på vegen med informasjon om vegarbeid.
Eg elskar nynorsk på butikken
når eg ser etter noko som er vanskeleg å finne her.
Eg elskar nynorsk, men vil nynorsk elske meg?
Nynorsk sendte meg eit offisielt brev.
Liten fin faktura.
Ein song på radioen på tannlegeklinikken.
Men når skal nynorsk byrje å elske meg?
Ein dag er veslejenta mi trøytt.
Ho vil berre sove.
Ho har gløymt klokka, gløymt dagen, gløymt bamsen, gløymt alt.
Ho har gløymt dagane på engelsk.
Ho har lyst til å snakke som den engelske dronninga.
Men i dag er ho så trøytt.
Ho er nesten sovna.
Ho seier ikkje I love you, ho seier Mamma, eg elskar deg.
Og så eg kjenner det.
At i dag, i kveld, elskar nynorsk meg.

Illustrasjon: Signe Wohlfeil

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