Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2012
Norwegian retroflexion exhibits some phonetic properties that do not seem to ‘make sense’. In Standard East Norwegian, an alveolar /ɾ/ causes a following alveolar coronal to become postalveolar, and in the Frogner and Arendal dialects of Norwegian, the same postalveolarisation process is triggered by a uvular /ʁ/. Comparative analyses of Norwegian dialects reveal that these properties are the results of historical changes and phonological diffusion across dialects. Theories attempting to analyse Norwegian retroflexion as phonetically ‘natural’ can neither fully account for these properties of Norwegian retroflexion nor capture the typological generalisations found across Norwegian dialects.
Parts of this work were presented at BLS 37, the 85th Annual Meeting of the LSA and the MIT Phonology Circle. I am grateful to the audience at these events for their comments and feedback. Earlier versions of this paper have also greatly benefited from comments and criticism from Adam Albright, Michael Becker, the editors of Phonology and three anonymous reviewers. I wish to thank Arne Torp for conducting the recording session with the speaker of the Frogner dialect on my behalf, and, finally, I am grateful to the dialect speakers consulted in this paper for letting me probe and record their phonological production.