# Norwegian: to av de har russisk bakgrunn



## Kiedis

Hi.

Here's a sentence from NRK website: ''De tre *er* nå *er* norske statsborgere, men *to av de* har russisk bakgrunn".

First about the first part: "De tre *er* nå *er* norske statsborgere". From the first sight, it may seem obvious that there are too many 'er' here. But I can swear that noticed pretty many similar constructions (i.e. double er) throughout several years, so I am in doubt now. Maybe I'm still don't know something?

And the second part: ''men *to av de* har russisk bakgrunn''. Shouldn't it be "to av dem''?


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## sdr083

The first part is definitely wrong 
The second part is more problematic. Dialectal Norwegian and Nynorsk don't distinguish between "de" and "dem". In Bokmål, the rules seem a bit fuzzy (at least to me, but I normally write in NN). 
You can find some info about the question (from Språkrådet) here.


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## mosletha

Yes, that sentence is completely wrong. There should indeed only be one usage of the word "er" here. I'm guessing the journalist originally wrote the sentence differently, and then messed up when changing it - this happens to all of us from time to time. It should also, indeed, be "to av dem". Lots of people _say_ "av de", though. 

Additionally, in nynorsk, "to av dei" would actually be correct. Back in the day, however, "av deim" was correct. Some dialects, adding to the confusion, do it the other way around (meaning they say stuff like "dem var dumme"). This "mistake" is pretty common in swedish too, from what I've heard. 

The lesson to be learned is that when reading and listening to Norwegian, don't be surprised when people use the wrong forms of de/dem.


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## Tjahzi

Yes, in Swedish, both _de _(nominative) and _dem _(oblique) have merged to [dom:] in spoken language. Since the distinction is not upheld while speaking, some writers have decided to abandon it in writing as well and have turned to using _dom_ in writing as well, resulting in three forms being used (_de, dem _and _dom_ that is). For educated people, this is under control, but people unaware of the distinction of the written language (and considering that it is in no way reflected in the spoken language, I can tell you they are numerous) tend to mix all there at random, which, of course, results in utter chaos. 

Norwegians, you have been warned, do something while there is still time!


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## louisjanus

I don't think that Norwegians need to be warned! It seems to me that all over the Germanic languages, pronouns are merging and losing some of their forms. (In English few make the distinction between the nominative _who_ and object _whom_, and further only we academics are worried about give it to John and *me* vs John and *I*. So the merger of 'de' and _dem_'. It is a natural development in all languages. We generally show object / subject roles by syntactic (word order), rather than cases.

Also the object pronoun of 'han' is quite fluid. I learned the standard 'ham' but 'han' is also allowed (by språkrådet) and used widely. In Nynorsk, the standard form is _honom_


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## basslop

I think louisjanus is right, whether we like it or not. An intereseting question about "de - dem" will be which one of them will survive? In my dialect area,  "de" is already omitted as nominative: 

"Dem har vært her" - "Jeg har ikke sett dem"

In other dialects (or maybe sosiolects) they do the other way round:

"De har ikke vært her" - "Jeg har ikke sett de" 

I think this effect will strengthen in the future.


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## Tjahzi

Well, of course the evolution of language is inevitable and necessary. My warnings concerned how and into what this transformation is to take place, having three, to some people, non-contrastive written forms (of which one is used in the spoken language). 
A peaceful merger of two pronouns into a uniform, universally accepted form, however, is very much acceptable, although tragic for a supporter of lingual synthetism.


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## montmorencywrf

For what it's worth, by analogy with modern English, a relatively non-inflected language by anybody's standards, even though the "who/whom" distinction is dying out, and "I/me" is frequently misused, I can't see, for example:

the distinction between

he and him
she and her
we and us
they and them

dying out any time soon. I presume that this is because these are perceived as  still fulfilling a useful function.


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## Tjahzi

That's very interesting considering that speakers of (roughly) 99% of the worlds languages perceive the distinction between _you_ and _you _to be one worth maintaining.


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## Cerb

It should be "dem" in the second part. While "ham" has gone out of use formally (i.e. written bokmål), there's still a distinction between "de" and "dem". 

As has been said, some dialects as well as sociolects don't observe this when spoken. There are a lot of plausible links here one could digress into, but suffice to say some Oslo residents consider "dem" to belong to a working class-sociolect. 

This only applies to "dem" used as subject (nom), but some people seem to avoid any use of "dem". While it might be due to not being aware of the difference, it's usually just a misguided attempt at sounding more formal. There's a good chance the person that wrote this would observe the difference in everyday conversation.


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