The present study investigates patterns of language use in the ego documents written by three Swedish immigrants: Nils Blomberg (born in 1839), Mathilda Blomberg, (b. 1863), and Anton Blomberg (b. 1885), their eldest son. The empirical foundation of the investigation is a set of 32 family letters sent over a period of nearly fifty years (1885–1934) from the rural Smoky Valley in Kansas to Mathilda’s home village in Östergötland, Sweden. We analyze the writers’ lexis, discourse patterning (formulaic versus free-flowing), and re-current topics, and the social roles and networks that are manifest in their correspondence. The three writers continued to correspond in the Swedish language over the years. Our diachronic analysis of their lexis and discourse patterning reveals individual variation across the authors’ production. For example, Mathilda’s correspondence contains some evidence of heritage Swedish (i.e. Swedish that has diverged from the home country, due to geographical separation and language contact with English). Across her lifespan, Mathilda integrates some vocabulary for plants, places, and jobs that diverges from the lexis she recalls from her early years in Sweden, and she draws attention to this lexical divergence for the sake of her readers. Anton, a childhood bilingual in Swedish and English, systematically translates English lexis to Swedish in letters, presumably with the goal to bring his Kansas experiences closer to his Swedish relatives. In particular, the letters, especially those by Mathilda, reveal not only how the individuals communicate information about their social roles in rural Kansas, but also their desires to maintain the networks connecting their family farm in the U.S. to Mathilda’s home village in Sweden.

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Recipe names and other elements in the discourse of cookbooks reveal important clues about language contact in communities settled by immigrants. In the case of cookbooks printed in Swedish-American networks, a number of recipe collections have been periodically updated and re-published. Linguists who tap into this printed material can thus carry out longitudinal discourse analysis of the names of recipes and of menu items to be served on a smörgåsbord. The present study examines cookbooks produced in selected localities and reports on linguistic patterns found in the cookbooks published in two small towns in central Kansas as well as in the urban centers of Kansas City and Chicago. The data are analyzed for evidence that Swedish, Heritage Swedish, and English have co-existed in varying proportions across the time period of study, which is 1895 to 2005, and across geographical space in the American Midwest. Looking at the phenomena of heritage as expressed linguistically, and to some extent to be understood notionally in the cookbook data, we describe the linguistic landscapes which have shaped the discourse of Swedish-American homes and entertainment practices. We employ the theoretical framework of enregisterment in order to account for how volunteer cookbook committees create local authenticity.