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Is it in or on?

A small mystery in the Norwegian language is which preposition you are supposed to use when it comes to place names.

You can live in - i - [name of town], but you can also live on - på - [name of another town], and it is often impossible to guess even for a Norwegian, which to use where, without having been told. And, you also risk offending the locals if you use the wrong one.

There are no grammatical rules that decide which to use, and this is of course where it gets complicated.

Sometimes you can make correct guesses based on the name of the town, since - for instance - Kongsberg means “King’s Mountain” and you live on a mountain, and Arendal means “Eagle Valley”, and you live in a valley. Simple logic.

But, unless you actually know it is called to live or stay on the town of - say - Lillehammer, whose etymological roots aren’t all that obvious any more, you have no way to make such a guess.

While you can avoid offending the locals simply by asking, it becomes logical first when you learn that Lillehammer - like so many of our towns and villages do - started out as a farm centuries upon centuries ago, and farms are something you live on. Also simple logic.

But etymology and logic do not always help. There are towns that started out as farms, but for which you use in, like Søgne, for instance. And we also have towns that started out as - and named after - some topographic or natural formation or feature where it would be natural to use in, like a valley or a forest, e.g. Oppdal or Finnskogen, but about which we actually use on.

In this episode of the Norwegian radio-show Språkteigen - a weekly show on Norwegian words and expressions - you can hear some explanations of some of the irregularities found in the use of prepositions in front of place names.

For advanced learners. And for Norwegians without a clue. OBS! Dialects will be heard.

Why would using the wrong preposition be offending??

I think ‘i’ is the most common preposition before place names so I’d say it’s mostly the locals in the ‘på’-places, in the ”special snowflake” places if you will (i’m just kidding), that get offended because (and this is pure speculation on my part) 1) they’re so tired of correcting everyone or 2) they’re proud of being in the ‘på’ minority, so being mislabeled is offending because it associates them with the lowly ‘i’ places lol. But no I don’t know, I don’t think it’s necessarily offensive, but rather it might be annoying to some.

My impression is that it is more about tradition and a sense of identity. The act of practicing something that directly relates to the very birth of the place you belong to, creates a connection to that place in both time and space, to your very roots. It’s almost a sacred act making sure visitors get to know that. Your home-place becomes almost a sort of extension of you. There are many people in på-places (I don’t have the statistics, but are they really a minority?) who count their ancestry from that very first farm the place has grown from.

Ok, yeah, I can see that. Honestly everything I said was pure speculation and guesswork. I don’t have statistics on that either, I was just assuming because the place names I know are mostly ‘i’-places. And I don’t have very strong ties to the place I come from either, so maybe that’s why I can’t see that easily why people would get offended by something like misuse of prepositions.

No worries! I’m from Trøndelag where there are a huge amount of på-places - Orkanger, Berkåk, Spongdal, Roan, Oppdal, Støren, Stjørdalshalsen, Brekstad, Namsos, Kyrksæterøra, Botngård, Levanger, Steinkjer, Kolvereid, Verdalsøra, Grong, Lauvsnes, Dun, Sistranda, Høylandet, Straumen, Leknes, Årnset, Malm, Snåsa, Hommelvik… Off the top of my head I can only recall two places that are i-places - Trondheim and Soknedal! Wait, maybe I can think of another couple if I try… Selbu! And… Børsa? Haha! I’m not sure!

EDIT: Look what I found!

From here.

So, på seems to be way more common.

I’m confused because the quote says ”Her er tradisjonen slik at foran de fleste norske stedsnavn, også navn på byer og tettsteder, brukes i, men foran en del slike navn er på den tradisjonelle preposisjonen.” but the lists indicate something else, which I think is because it focuses on places that aren’t necessarily municipalities (big cities like Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim, Drammen, Tønsberg are for example not mentioned).

Something I found (from here) basically says that using ‘i’ is the rule of thumb for most places, but that some place names take ‘på’ (especially when talking about islands, mountains etc.), although it’s hard to be completely sure because there are so many exceptions.

Anyway, let’s not make it a ”competition” for which is more common, because we don’t know for sure, and end this on the note that asking locals is the best way to go about the problem when you go to a new place!

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