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Euphoria and Dysphoria in Norway's Vestfold Dialect - part I

© Valerie Borey

Among linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers, there’s a growing interest in the relevance and accuracy of translating particular key cultural concepts into a foreign language or distant time. How accurately can we represent another culture’s sentiments through word-for-word translations? If certain concepts can be claimed to be universal, which ones are they? Languages frequently borrow terms in order to express something for which there is no native label – familiar words such as ennui, gestalt, and tsunami were initially brought in to resolve the gaps in English descriptive language.

Terms of emotion and interpersonal relations, in particular, represent an area of considerable concern in psychology, literature, and cross-cultural communications. Every language makes use of a unique sub-set of imagery and metaphor to describe the intra- and inter-personal workings of it’s linguistic members. It is through understanding these cultural models that we begin to detect and appreciate the subtlety with which they convey highly personal meaning.

As the Vestfold dialect of Norway’s southern region is the one I have most familiarity with, I have chosen to focus on this dialect to go over the most commonly used terms and concepts of euphoric and dysphoric emotions in Norwegian. The metaphors used in conjunction with those terms offer a somewhat different assortment of imagery than those in English usage. Frequent references to birds, for instance, are used as a comparison to one's own physiological state. Emotions are often differentiated in terms of whether or not they can be seen by others.

In order to get a good idea of how "emotions" are conceptualized in Norwegian, I back-translated the words "feeling" and "emotion" via my bilingual dictionary (Berulfsen and Seavenius). Emotions are most commonly referred to as "folelse", which would actually translate into "feeling". As in English, this word can be used in describing a sensation (I feel cold) as well as an emotion (I feel sad). Under the term "emotion" I found a few archaic terms which, however, were interesting in themselves. Much of the imagery revolves around states of agitation and being "stirred up".

Feeling = folelse = feeling, sensibility, sensation
Emotion = sinnsbevegelse = emotion, excitement, agitation (sinnet = minded, disposed, bevegelse = to move or stir) = rorelse = emotion, agitation (rore = to move or stir)

Euphoric Emotions
Happy appeared to me to be the most basic euphoric emotion to investigate. My dictionary, however, did not seem to offer an equivalent term for this. In fact, happy is depicted in terms of being lucky, a meaning happy once held in the English language as well. Some of the words associated with it refer to intersecting circumstances, such as meeting, hitting, striking, or responding to any of these.

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