Norwegian in the American Midwest: A Common Dialect?

Johannessen, Janne Bondi; Laake, Signe

doi:10.1163/19552629-01001002

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Crucially, the situation for the Norwegian heritage speakers is quite different, since there is no influence from the standard language (cf. Johannessen and Laake, forthcoming ). Instead, the heritage speakers generally only speak and understand their own dialect, and they have no knowledge of the written language.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These factors appear to play different roles in different linguistic domains. For instance, it has been shown that direct transfer from English affects the vocabulary (including function words), but not necessarily core syntax (Haugen, 1953 ; Hasselmo, 1974 ; Johannessen and Laake, 2012 , forthcoming ; Larsson et al, 2015 ). Larsson and Johannessen ( 2015a , b ) argue that incomplete acquisition on the other hand has led to syntactic change: Heritage Scandinavian has a different word order in embedded clauses than do the Norwegian and Swedish varieties as spoken in Scandinavia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandinavian

Johannessen

Larsson

2015

Front. Psychol.

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This paper investigates aspects of the noun phrase from a Scandinavian heritage language perspective, with an emphasis on noun phrase-internal gender agreement and noun declension. Our results are somewhat surprising compared with earlier research: We find that noun phrase-internal agreement for the most part is rather stable. To the extent that we find attrition, it affects agreement in the noun phrase, but not the declension of the noun. We discuss whether this means that gender is lost and has been reduced to a pure declension class, or whether gender is retained. We argue that gender is actually retained in these heritage speakers. One argument for this is that the speakers who lack agreement in complex noun phrases, have agreement intact in simpler phrases. We have thus found that the complexity of the noun phrase is crucial for some speakers. However, among the heritage speakers we also find considerable inter-individual variation, and different speakers can have partly different systems.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandinavian

Johannessen

Larsson

2015

Front. Psychol.

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“…Even though the new arrivals came from many different dialect groups, the dialect spoken by the largest number of immigrants (from rural eastern Norway) has become dominant and is typically the only one that survives among Norwegian HSs today (Johannessen & Salmons 2015;Johannessen & Laake 2012. Johannessen & Laake (2012) propose that this variety formed the basis of a koiné, and thus, the variety spoken by Norwegian immigrants in the US should be regarded as one lexically defined dialect (Johannessen & Laake 2017). Nevertheless, when studying any linguistic phenomenon in HN, we do so without any definitive knowledge about what the input to these speakers was.…”

Section: Research Questions and Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Word order variation in heritage languages

Anderssen¹,

Westergaard

2020

Studies in Bilingualism

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This study investigates two word order phenomena in Norwegian heritage language spoken in the US, subject shift (SS) and object shift (OS). SS and OS occur in syntactic environments where (pronominal) subjects and objects may either precede or follow negation. This paper explores to what extent these two phenomena in Heritage Norwegian are affected by the factors frequency and structural similarity/difference. As subjects are frequently shifted, while objects are not, SS is expected to be robust and OS vulnerable. There is generally no structural overlap between English and Norwegian in these cases; thus, crosslinguistic similarity or difference should not play a role, except in one context: questions with auxiliaries or be, in which the two languages allow both orders (is he not/isn't he), but have opposite preferences. The results show that OS is somewhat vulnerable, but SS is also affected, in that both proficient and less proficient speakers seem to overuse the word order preferred in English. We thus speculate that all heritage speakers may be affected by crosslinguistic influence in situations with complete structural overlap.

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“…Then started a period where English gradually took over key functions in AmNo societies, and today, AmNo is a moribund language. Nevertheless, despite great variation in individual competences, all speakers are relatively fluent (see, e.g., Johannessen and Salmons 2012;Johannessen and Laake 2017).…”

Section: Language Mixing In American Norwegianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Compound-Internal Language Mixing in American Norwegian

Eik

Riksem

2022

Languages

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This paper investigates cases of compounding in the heritage language American Norwegian (AmNo), where elements from Norwegian and English are mixed word-internally, e.g., hoste-candy ‘cough candy’, where the Norwegian item hoste ‘cough’ is combined with the English item candy. Norwegian and English create compounds in similar ways, but with certain important differences, e.g., the use of linking elements. Based on data from the Corpus of American Nordic Speech, we investigate the encounter of these two languages within one word and find that both Norwegian and English lexical items occur as both left-hand and right-hand members of mixed compounds. Moreover, these mixed compounds are generally accompanied by Norwegian functional items. Hence, we argue that the overall structure of mixed compounds in AmNo is Norwegian, and English lexical items may be inserted into specific positions. This is successfully analyzed in a DM/exoskeletal model of grammar. We show that our results are in line with what we expect based on previous accounts of AmNo language mixing and Norwegian compounds, and our specific focus on compound-internal mixing provides a novel perspective and new insights into both the structure of compounds and the nature of language mixing.

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Norwegian in the American Midwest: A Common Dialect?

Cited by 9 publications

References 8 publications

Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandinavian

Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandinavian

Word order variation in heritage languages

Compound-Internal Language Mixing in American Norwegian

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