The town is located at the southern end of the Sørfjorden, in a narrow valley between towering mountains and the lake Sandvinvatnet to the south.

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

[5][6][7] In 2010, an international report stated: What makes Odda smelteverk so important and central to the application of Norway’s hydro power sites and pioneer chemical industry as a World Heritage Site is the fact that here in an internationally unique way the physical remains of an early chemical production process are still present.

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

The researcher Paul Kerswill conducted an intensive study of the Norwegian spoken in the two communities, relating them to very different geographical origins: The workers in Odda came predominantly (86%) from western Norway.