Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

e discussed in the following section). Oftedal was an experienced linguist,
born and bred in Jæren, and thus had good local knowledge. In his
text, he focusses particularly on the production of stops and does not just
mention them in passing. Also, and most importantly, it is implicit in
Oftedal’s remark that, in terms of stop aspiration, the dialect(s) of
Bjerkreim and Dalane are distinct not only from the Jæren dialect, but also
from other standardised varieties of Norwegian (such as the dialect of the
Oslo region). As previously argued, word-medial fortis stops in standard
varieties of Norwegian tend to be unaspirated or (non-normatively) preaspirated
(cf. Ch. 3, sections 3.4.3 and 3.6). It is likely that these stops
have little or no postaspiration, like the stops of CSw (cf. section 4.2.4). If
this were not the case, there would be no reason for Oftedal to single out
the Bjerkreim-Dalane dialect as being special.
Obviously, the surest way of verifying the presence of postaspiration
in these dialects is simply to listen to recordings from these areas, but I
have not had the opportunity to do this. Thus, this remains an area for future
research.
4.5.3 Western Åland
The stop production of the Western Åland dialects has not previously
been the subject of any detailed phonetic study; nor have impressionistic
observations of these dialects led to a description of the word-medial
fortes as being postaspirated. It was informally observed that an Åland
speaker (subject ES in the following account) tended to postaspirate her
word-medial fortis stops quite strongly. To investigate this further, recordings
of several Central and Western Åland speakers were obtained.
These recordings confirmed that the ON word-medial fortes tended to be
reflected as postaspirated in most contexts.
Two of the subjects analysed (NK and AJ) come from the village of
Storby on the island of Eckerö, a fairly large island to the west of Åland
proper (see map in Figure 3–6). The remaining two subjects (MG and
ES) come from the area near Gottby in the southern part of Åland proper
(again, see map in Figure 3–6). 1 For the sake of simplicity, the dialect of
1 An auditory analysis of subjects from the area around Jomala in the very center of
Åland proper (to the northwest of Gottby) did not suggest any particularly strong post-
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