Competing discourses about language, immigration, and integration in Norwegian media

Abstract Media discourse has been an important site of investigation in attempts to understand the semiotic dimensions of power relations, including in analyses of ways in which linguistic and social hierarchies are discursively forged and contested. In this article, I examine Norwegian media discourses on “Kebab Norwegian”, a register that has been typically associated with youth with immigrant background in Oslo, Norway. The corpus generated for this study is composed of 90 articles containing the query term kebabnorsk (“Kebab Norwegian”) published in five newspapers in Norway between 2015 and 2021. Drawing on analytical tools from Critical Discourse Studies, the analysis undertaken here has identified five designations of Kebab Norwegian: (1) as slang-marked; (2) as bad, wrong, broken; (3) as style; (4) as dialect, sociolect, multiethnolect; and (5) in dispute. The article provides an integrated perspective that combines registers and language ideologies and engages with theories of decoloniality to demonstrate that investigating competing discourses in Norwegian media about “Kebab Norwegian” can shed light on the particular ways in which the boundaries of what is acceptable to say in public debates about immigration, integration, and language have been shifting.