Grammaticalization in the North

92 use of preproprial articles to refer to unacquainted referents. The reluctance that Delsing has found in some dialects against using preproprial articles with names such as Jesus and Elvis should perhaps be explained by their cultural foreignness than by the relationship between the speaker and their referents.

According to Delsing (2003a: 21), preproprial articles are used generally in Norrland excluding Hälsingland and Gästrikland, in Västerdalarna and northern Värmland, further in most of Norway, excluding an area in the south and bilingual areas in the north. This is in full accordance with other statements in other sources and with the usage reflected in texts that I have seen, in particular the Cat Corpus.

Delsing also says that they are used “sometimes” in Faroese and “optionally” in Icelandic spoken language. It can be seen that the distribution of preproprial articles overlaps significantly with that of extended uses of definite forms, but there are also some striking differences. Thus, if we compare the area where preproprial articles are obligatory with the area where non-delimited uses of definite forms are common, we can see that they overlap in Upper and Middle Norrland, that is, in the provinces of Jämtland and Ångermanland and the Westrobothnian and Norrbothnian dialect areas.

Outside this zone, however, there is no location where the two phenomena co-exist.

Thus, preproprial articles are found in most of Norway and along the Norwegian border all the way from northern Värmland and northwards except in Ovansiljan – the southern stronghold of non-delimited uses of definite forms. On the other side of the Baltic, Ostrobothnia behaves like Ovansiljan in these two regards. These facts suggest that preproprial articles and extended uses of definite forms have separate histories of origin.

Looking back in time, I do not know of any very old attestations of preproprial articles from Swedish vernaculars, but I have found several older texts in the Norwegian Diplomatarium with uses of pronouns that look very much like preproprial articles. One such text, consisting of one long sentence with no less than five occurrences of the pattern Pronoun+Proper Name, is rendered in the Appendix. It dates from 1430 – regrettably the location is not known. It thus appears that the usage was fairly firmly established in at least some Norwegian varieties already in medieval times. This, together with the geographical distribution in the Swedish dialectal area, suggests a spread from Norway, perhaps most probably from Trøndelag.

Proper names also sometimes show up with definite suffixes (called “postproprial articles” by Delsing (2003a: 23)). This usage appears to be less systematic and is most common with surnames (occasionally even in more standard varieties of Swedish).

With kin terms, definite suffixes are found in Upper Norrlandic vernaculars where standard Swedish has a bare form and many other vernaculars have preproprial articles. Cf. the following examples: