Put Your Accent Where Your Mouth Is: How Dialect Becomes a Map of Identity in Valdres (and a Southern Cuban-American)
In A Winning Dialect , anthropologist Thea Strand takes readers into the verdant folds of Norway’s Valdres Valley, where dialect isn’t just something you speak, it’s something you are. Through her ethnographic study, Strand explores how language varieties in Norway are entangled with personal identity, regional pride, historical resistance, and a curious phenomenon: the commodification of dialect. In this paper, I’ll dive into one particular thread of her study, the way the Valdresmål dialect shapes and reflects regional identity, and analyze it through the lens of the anthropological concept of indexicality. Spoiler: it got personal. As Ahearn explains in Living Language, indexicality helps us understand how language and social relationships intersect, not just in what words mean, but in what they do. She writes, “A key concept that assists scholars in pinpointing these intersections is ‘indexicality’” (Ahearn, 29), which refers to the way certain linguistic features poi...