Odda

This article is about the Norwegian municipality and town. For the English ealdorman, see Ealdorman Odda. For the English earl, see Earl Odda.

Odda kommune
—  Municipality  —
Coat of arms Hordaland within Norway
Odda within Hordaland
Coordinates: 60°1′33″N 6°40′2″E / 60.02583°N 6.66722°E / 60.02583; 6.66722Coordinates: 60°1′33″N 6°40′2″E / 60.02583°N 6.66722°E / 60.02583; 6.66722
Country	Norway
County	Hordaland
District	Hardanger
Administrative centre	Odda
Government
- Mayor (2007)	Gard Folkvord (Ap)
Area
- Total	1,616 km2 (623.9 sq mi)
- Land	1,478 km2 (570.7 sq mi)
Area rank	42 in Norway
Population (2004)
- Total	7,468
- Rank	131 in Norway
- Density	5/km2 (12.9/sq mi)
- Change (10 years)	-8.0 %
Demonym	Odding[1]
Time zone	CET (UTC+1)
- Summer (DST)	CEST (UTC+2)
ISO 3166 code	NO-1228
Official language form	Neutral
Website	odda.kommune.no
Data from Statistics Norway

Historical populations
Year	Pop.	±%
1951	8,807	—
1960	9,584	+8.8%
1970	10,051	+4.9%
1980	9,183	−8.6%
1990	8,289	−9.7%
2000	7,727	−6.8%
2007	7,154	−7.4%
2008	7,107	−0.7%
2009	7,054	−0.7%
Source: Statistics Norway.

 Odda (help·info) is a municipality and town in the county of Hordaland, Norway. Odda was separated from Ullensvang on 1 July 1913 and on 1 January 1964 Røldal was merged with Odda. The town of Odda is the centre of the landscape of Hardanger, located at the end of the Hardangerfjord.

In 1927, Erling Johnson, working at Odda Smelteverk, invented a process to produce fertilizers. This process is now known as the Odda process.

General information

Name

The municipality (originally the parish) is named after the old farm Odda (Old Norse Oddi), since the first church was built there. The name is identical with the word oddi which means "headland".

Coat-of-arms

The coat-of-arms is from modern times. They were granted on 8 October 1982. The arms show a canting of an arrowhead (Norwegian language: pilodd). The name of the village, however is not derived from an arrow head, but from a landscape element.^[2]

History

Odda in February, 2004.

The Røldal stave church was built around 1200 - 1250 in Røldal.

The present Odda is a modern town which grew up around smelters built at the head of the Sørfjord branch of the Hardangerfjord in the mid-twentieth century, drawing migrants from different parts of Norway.

The carbide production and the subsequent production of cyanamide was started in 1908 after the water power plant was operational and provided the necessary electricity for the arc furnaces. The plant was the largest in the world and remained operational till 2003 shortly after the plant was sold to Philipp Brothers Chemicals Inc. The Norwegian government tried to get the site recognized together with other industrial plants as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.^[3][4]

As a result, there developed in town a new dialect, a mixture of that spoken in the home regions of the migrants - a phenomenon termed by linguists "a Koiné language".

Odda provided valuable insights to linguists studying this phenomenon. The researcher Kerswill conducted an intensive study of the Norwegian spoken in Odda and in its neighbor Tyssedal, which arose in the same time and socio-economic circumstances as those of Odda but its inhabitants came from a very different geographical origin: The workers in Odda came predominantly (86%) from western Norway. In Tyssedal only about one third came from western Norway; one third came from eastern Norway; and the rest from other parts of the country.

The dialects that evolved in these two towns were radically different from each other, though spoken at a short geograhical distance from each other.

Geography

Odda municipality includes the waterfall Låtefossen; the lakes Sandvinvatnet, Votna, Valldalsvatnet, Røldalsvatnet, Ringedalsvatnet, Langavatnet, and parts of Ståvatn; the glacier Buarbreen and parts of Folgefonna National Park.

Trolltunga

References

1. ^ "Personnemningar til stadnamn i Noreg" (in Norwegian). Språkrådet. http://www.sprakrad.no/nb-no/Sprakhjelp/Rettskrivning_Ordboeker/Innbyggjarnamn/. 
2. ^ Norske Kommunevåpen (1990). "Nye kommunevåbener i Norden". http://www.ngw.nl/int/nor/o/odda.htm. Retrieved 22 September 2008. 
3. ^ Heiden, Noland R (1952). "Odda and Rjukan: Two Industrialized Areas of Norway". Annals of the Association of American Geographers 42 (2): 109–128. JSTOR 2560975. 
4. ^ "Rjukan/Notodden and Odda/Tyssedal Industrial Heritage Sites, Hydro Electrical Powered Heavy Industries with associated Urban Settlements (Company Towns) and Transportation System". UNESCO. http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5472/. Retrieved 2010-06-29. 

External links

• Media related to Odda at Wikimedia Commons