Landets finaste dialekt ‘the country’s nicest dialect’ (25) is spoken in Valdres, a rural district ‘along the eastern edge of the mountainous divide that separates the coastal fjords of Western Norway from the inland valleys and forests of Eastern Norway’ (5). In 2005, Valdresmål won the Reiseradioen ‘Travel radio’ dialect popularity contest, triumphing over 200 other varieties. Thea R. Strand, a heritage speaker of Valdresmål who has conducted decades of fieldwork in the region, draws an immersive portrait of the ‘natural sociolinguistic laboratory’ (28) that is contemporary Norway. Her rich syntheses should be of interest to scholars of language, place, and the commodification of culture under late capitalism.

Crucially, the work stands to be valuable to lay Norwegians, a population known for ‘an unusually high level of interest in language’ (7). Strand appears to have such readers in mind, as the tone of the book is didactic yet admirably accessible, with all specialist terms painstakingly defined and contextualised. In her account of the dialect contest (chapter 1), she positions the Norwegian media as a purveyor of an exotic traditionalism ‘that prefers non-normative, geographically central, rural dialects’ (24) and the Norwegian citizen as metalinguistically hyperaware: Foreldrudn mine e jo forsatt støe på dativformadn ‘My parents are still surefooted in using dative forms’ (83).

Although the focus is on contemporary ideologies, there is abundant discussion of the longue durée of Norwegian language politics, starting from as early as 1100 AD, when Trondheim was the capital and Old Latin and Norse were the languages of education (chapter 2). A detailed treatment of målstriden ‘the language conflict between the two written standards, Bokmål [book language] and Nynorsk [New Norwegian]’ follows. The former is based on Dano-Norwegian, and the second is based on rural dialects, including Valdresmål. Nynorsk is the standard adopted by elementary schools in Valdres and forms a part of the Valdresmålophone identity and practice of older speakers. Strand demonstrates that structural congruence with Nynorsk is a driver of language change in the Valdresmål of younger speakers (chapter 4), despite the fact that many of them abandon Nynorsk for Bokmål in secondary school. What emerges is a multilayered account of ‘opportunities for linguistic choice, variation, resistance, and reflection that are unique and distinctly Norwegian’ (43).

Ample data from Valdresmål are taken from interactional and mediatised contexts (chapter 3), as well as from a linguistic landscape in conversation with a tourism industry (chapter 5) that sells to ‘reader-consumers the pleasure of recognizing and “decoding” non-normative written language’ (120), but only those linguistic features are judged legible, authentic, and thus marketable to outsiders. The two pillars of the Norwegian language ecology—the presence of two written standards and the absence of a spoken standard—find no parallel even within the Nordic context, and therefore a broader cross-Nordic perspective would have been more than welcome. But as a travel brochure may tell you, Valdres skjerper sansane ‘Valdres sharpens the senses’ well enough on its own.