Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol. 1
Copyright © Björn Lundquist 2014
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Bliva and varda[*]

Björn Lundquist

UiT The Arctic University of Norway

1. Introduction

In this chapter, we discuss the use of the auxiliaries (or copulas) bliva and varda in the Nordic varieties. The phenomenon investigated is slightly different from the other phenomena discussed in NALS Volume 1 in that it is not really a syntactic phenomenon, but rather a lexical one. Bliva and varda are used as auxiliaries in periphrastic passives (followed by a passive participle), but they are also used as main verbs or copulas with the meaning ‘become’ or ‘remain’/’stay’, taking adjectival, nominal, prepositional or participial complements. Varda is an Old Norse auxiliary (varða), which originally was used primarily in the meaning ‘become’, but it was also the auxiliary used in periphrastic passives (see Markey 1969, p. 17). Bliva was borrowed from Middle Dutch (MD) and Middle Low German (MLG) (bleiben/bliven) around mid 14th century, originally mainly in the meaning ‘remain’. As discussed extensively by Markey (1969), the ‘become’ meaning of bleiben/bliven had already developed when the auxiliary spread to Scandinavia. The main reason why bliva spread at the cost of varda, is according to Markey (1969, and see references therein) the fact that the paradigms for varda and the copula vara ‘be’ merged, as the phoneme /ð/ (as in varða) was lost in Mainland Scandinavian. Today, bliva is found all over Scandinavia, with the exception of Iceland and some parts of Eastern Finland. Varda is however also still used in most parts of Scandinavia, at least in the past tense, with the exception of Denmark, and the southern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland.

2. Results

2.1 Nordic Syntactic Database (NSD)

In the ScanDiaSyn survey, bliva and varda were tested in the past tense, in a construction with a passive participle. The following two sentences were tested in Norway, Sweden and Finland:

(1)	Han ble skadd i ulykka. (#427) (Nor.) he bliva.past injure.part in accident.def ‘He was injured in the accident.’

(2)	Han vart skadd i ulykka. (#428) (Nor.) he varda.past injure.part in accident.def ‘He was injured in the accident.’

The results are shown in Map 1 and Map 2 below:

As can be seen in the two maps above, both varda and bliva are to a large degree accepted by the same speakers. As will be made clear in discussion part below, varda is in most parts of Mainland Scandinavia only used in the past tense and sometimes in the perfect tense, while bliva has a complete tense paradigm form most speakers.

In the Faroe Islands, bliva was also tested as a an auxiliary in a past tense passive:

(3)	Vindeygað bleiv knappliga opnað av onkrum. (#427) (Far.) window.def bliva.past suddenly open.part by somethingsg.dat. ‘The window was suddenly opened by something.’

The results are shown in Map 3 below:

As can be seen, there is quite a lot of variation in the Faroe Islands concerning the acceptance of bliva as a passive auxiliary. This will be returned to in section 3.4 below.

3. Discussion

Below I will first discuss Norwegian (3.1) and then Sweden (3.2), Eastern Finland (3.2) and finally Faroese (3.3).

3.1 Norway

In most parts of Norway, only the past tense and the past participial forms of varda are available. Many speakers have the following paradigm: bli (inf.)- bli(r) (pres.) - vart (past) – vorte/værte/vørrte (perfect participle). In most parts of Norway where this paradigm exists, a full bliva-paradigm is also used by many speakers. The paradigm for bliva has the following form bli (inf.)- bli(r) (pres.) - ble(i) (past) – blivi(t)/blitt (perfect participle). Some speakers seem to alternate more or less freely between the two paradigms, while other speakers stick to one of the paradigms.[1]

In some parts of Norway, most notably Nord-Trøndelag and Oppland, the regular past and perfect participial forms of bliva are completely absent, as can be seen in map 1 above. Also in the Nordic Dialect Corpus, we find spots in Norway where past or participial uses of blive are not attested, for example in southern Nordland (Hattefjell and Sømna), Nord-Trøndelag, Møre og Romsdal (Aure, Surnadal and Todalen), Oppland and Buskerud (Ål). The two maps below show the attested instances of the participial form of bliva (map 4) and varda (map 5). Note that the participial forms of blive and varda vary significantly throughout Norway. For bliva we commonly find the forms blivi, blive, and blitt, but also forms without /l/, such as bitt, and bett and binnt (mainly in Nordland and southern Troms). For varda, forms like vørrte, vårrti, and værrte are common.

Vannebo (1997) reports that infinitival and present tense forms of varda still exist in parts of Norway, most notably in Nord-Trøndelag, with the present tense form val (see below on the Österbotten dialect). In the Nordic Dialect Corpus, infinitival and present tense forms of varda are found only in Western Norway, most notably in Rogaland, Hordaland and Møre and Romsdal (this is in accordance with the patterns reported in Markey 1969). Here, the infinitival form is either værrta/vætta or værrte/vætte. The present tense val-form is not attested, though a very small number of present tense forms like varrte/vette/værrte and værrt/varrt can be found. Map 6 below shows the places where infinitival use of varda is attested.

It should be noted that only one of the young informants uses the infinitival varda (a young woman from Voss, Hordaland, who consistently uses the form vætta). Similarly, there is only one, or possibly two instances of present tense varda from the younger informants.

3.2. Sweden

As we see in map 1 above, past tense of bliva (blev) is accepted all over the Swedish speaking area, with the exception of Österbotten in Finland. Past tense of varda (vart) is also accepted in most parts, with the exceptions of southern Sweden and southern Finland. However, there is an important difference between Norway and Sweden when it comes to varda. As was discussed in section 3.1, both past tense and the past participial forms of varda are used in large parts of Norway (see map 4 above for the past participle of varda), whereas only the past tense form is found in most parts of Sweden. The most common mixed/suppletive paradigm has the following shape: bli(va) (inf.) – blir (pres.) – vart (past) – blivit/blitt (perf. part.). In general, a complete bli-paradigm exists side by side with the mixed, with blev as the past tense form. In the Nordic Dialect Corpus, we see that many speakers alter between blev and vart.[2] The only area where we exclusively find vart is the part of Dalarna where Övdalian is spoken. Here we also find the only instances of the perfect participial form of varda – uortet (woman from Evertsberg) in the Swedish parts of the corpus.[3] However, it should be noted that the spoken material from northern Sweden is still fairly small in the Nordic Dialect Corpus, and we can be quite sure that more tense forms of varda can be found in north-western Sweden (in Västerbotten), where we can expect to find a tense-paradigm of varda similar to that in Österbotten, Finland, as discussed below.

3.3. Österbotten

In Österbotten in Finland, we find spots where bliva is not used at all, and where varda has a full tense paradigm: varda (inf.) – var/val (pres.) – vart/vort (past) – vari (perf. part.). Most notably we find this in the Närpes dialect in southern Österbotten, as discussed extensively in Ivars (1988) and Ivars (2010). Markey (1969) reports that this paradigm is found in Nord-Trøndelag in Norway (see also Vannebo 1996) and northern Sweden (Jämtland, Västerbotten and Norrbotten), but it is not clear if this paradigm is still actively used in these areas.

In the Närpes dialect, the semantics of varda is slightly different from bliva/varda in the other parts of Scandinavia. As mentioned in the introduction, bliva was primarily used with meaning ‘remain’/’stay’ when it was first borrowed into Scandinavian, and at that time, varda did not have this meaning. Today in Österbotten, varda cannot mean ‘remain’/’stay’ (this is true for Icelandic verða as well). In the parts of Scandinavia where both varda (in the past (and perfect) tense) and bliva are used, the two verbs are now semantically equivalent, as shown in the following example, where both varda and bliva can be used in the meaning ‘stay’/’remain’:[4]

(4)	Bilen blev /vart stående i garaget i flera månader. (Swe.) car.def bliva.past varda.past stand.pres_part in garage.def in several month.pl ‘The car remained (standing) in the garage for several months.’

(5)	Han blev /vart borta i flera år. (Swe.) he bliva.past varda.past away in several year.pl ‘He stayed away for several years.’ (or ‘He ended up being away….’)

In Österbotten, the verb lämna ‘leave’, with an infinitival or locative complement, has to be used to express the meaning in 3 - 4, as shown in 5 - 6 below. Note that lämna cannot be used intransitively in the rest of Scandinavia (see Ivars 2003 for discussion of this construction, examples 5 - 6 from Ivars, p.c.):

(6)	Bi:lin lömna ti sta: i gara:sje i fleir moåna. (Öst.) car.def leave.past inf.m stand.inf in garage.def in several month.pl ‘The car remained (standing) in the garage for several months.’

(7)	Han lömna bårrt i fläir oår. (Öst.) he leave.past away in several year.pl ‘He stayed away for several years.’ (or ‘He ended up being away….’)

3.4. The Faroe Islands

The use of blíva and verða in Faroese has been extensively investigated by Majbritt Pauladóttir (see Pauladóttir 2009). According to Pauladóttir, the two verbs have existed side by side for a long time; the first written instantiations of blíva are from the 15th century, though blíva was probably not incorporated into the spoken language until much later. Due to the conservative sociolinguistic situation, speakers have tried to avoid using blíva in written language since it is not considered ‘good language’ (see Pauladóttir 2009). Blíva seems to have entered the spoken language fairly late, under the influence of Danish. In contrast to the Mainland Scandinavian languages, verða is more or less absent in the past tenses in spoken language, though frequent in the present tense. This could be due to the fact that the preterite forms of vera ‘be’ and verða are hard to separate in spoken language (due to deletion of /ð/).

Interestingly, Pauladottír notes that the two verbs have slighly different uses. As has been mentioned above, varda in Old Norse, Ostrobothnian and Icelandic is not used in the meaning ‘remain’/’stay’. In Faroese however, this meaning is present with verða, though, interestingly, absent with blíva, which always has an inchoative meaning. This raises interesting questions about grammaticalization patterns, and the relation between tense/aspect and the semantic shift from ‘become’ to ‘stay’/’remain’ (or the other way around, see Markey 1969: 75-84).

References

Eklund, Gerd. 2010. ‘Bliva och varda,’ in Östen Dahl and Lars-Erik Edlund (ed.) Språken i Sverige, Nordstedts Förlagsgrupp, Stockholm, 75-76.

Ivars, Ann-Marie. 2010. Sydösterbottnisk syntax, Studier i nordisk filologi 84 . Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, Helsingfors.

Ivars, Ann-Marie. 2003. ‘Lämna – en provinsialism och dess syntax’ in Ann-Marie Ivars, Sari Maamies, Peter Slotte and Marika Tandefelt (ed.) Boken om våra modersmål. Festskrift till Mikael Reuter på hans 60-årsdag den 17 maj 2003, Schildts Förlag AB, Helsingfors. 130-139.

Ivars, Ann-Marie. 1988. Närpesdialekten på 1980-talet, Studier i nordisk filologi 70 . Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, Helsingfors.

Markey, Thomas L.. 1969. The verbs varda and bliva in Scandinavian, Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri AB, Uppsala.

Pauladóttir, Majbritt. 2009. ‘Noen betraktninger rundt distribusjonen av verbena blíva og verða I moderne, muntlig færøysk’ Språk i Norden 2009. 215-250.

Vannebo, Kjell Ivar. 1996. ‘Framtidskonstruksjonen bli+inf’ in Ernst Håkon Jahr and Olof Skare (ed.) Nordnorske dialektar, Novus Forlag Oslo.

Web sites:

Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal: http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nals

Nordic Dialect Corpus: http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/scandiasyn/index.html

Nordic Syntax Database: http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/scandiasyn/index.html

---

[*] For discussion and data, I would like to thank Lars-Olof Delsing, Marie Ivars, Majbritt Pauladottír and Helge Sandøy.

[1] Helge Sandøy (p.c.) informs me that the mixed/suppletive paradigm is very strong among the younger speakers in Møre and Romsdal.

[2] In a study on the use of varda and bli in the Swedish city Eskilstuna, Södermanland, as reported on by Eklund (2011), it was shown that blev and vart were more or less equally frequent, and that half of the informant categorically used one of the version, while the other half altered between the two version.

[3]The Swedish part of the Nordic Dialect Corpus is at the time of writing much smaller than the Norwegian part, and glosses are sometimes missing and therefore it is harder to exclude the existence of past participial uses of varda in other places in Sweden.

[4]There may be some some speaker variation here: some speakers report that they have a preference for blev in 5, though they find both verbs equally good in 4.