Basisonderwijs En Dialekt In Skandinavie

In the first part of our paper we investigate what the law and the official curriculum say about the use of dialect in primary schools in Denmark, Sweden, the Swedish-speaking part of Finland and Norway. In (2) we take a look at the language attitudes of pupils and teachers towards dialect, while (3) deals with the question if, when and by whom dialect is used during the lessons. In countries with a standard language education is generally based on this standard. Pupils speaking other varieties are said to have problems at school. What kind of problems are signalled in Scandinavia is dealt with in (4). In (5) we discuss what solutions, in the form of experiments with different methods of integrating the mother tongue and the standard language, are found. In this paper we contrast Denmark, Sweden and Finland with Norway. The first three countries have both a written and a spoken standard language, and all pupils are supposed to learn to understand, read, write and speak this standard in a more or less rigid form. Norway has over a hundred years experience in dialect integration, since its 1879 Education Act says that education should be given as much as possible in the children's own language. There is no official spoken standard language, but there are two officially recognized written standards. These are however, not as rigid as those in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. We conclude with recommendations given by Scandinavian experts on education, with regard to the integration of dialect in education (6).