The Formation of the Genre System on Norwegian Broadcast Radio

This article deals with the formation and first development of the radio genre system in Norway in the interwar years (1925-1940). It is shown that the programmes of the 1920s were mostly imperfect reproductions of existent cultural forms. Yet, a beginning modernization of the genre repertoire took place in the 1930s. Whereas the rudimentary genre repertoire of the 1920s was built up through a plain copying from other domains in society, the latter half of the 1930s saw the introduction of a more advanced genre-generating process whereby new genres were formed through a mixing of two or more existing norms. This article also identifies a number of developmental trends that had their slow start in the 1920s and would mark the evolution of Norwegian radio’s registers and genres ever since.