Heritage Norwegian Vowel Phonology and English Dialect Formation

Abstract

I present an acoustic analysis of the English and Norwegian spoken by contemporary heritage Norwegian-English bilinguals from northwestern Minnesota to evaluate claims of Norwegian substrate influence on the development of Upper Midwestern American English dialects. Specifically, this paper focuses on the English /o/ vowel, as in ‘goat’ or ‘boat,’ with a flat or falling trajectory (i.e., monophthongal /o/), that is a regional feature of the English of Minnesota and North Dakota (Allen, 1973–1976, vol. 3, pp. 22–23; Moen, 1988; Purnell, Raimy, & Salmons, in press; Thomas, 2001). Thomas (2001, p. 72) points to transfer from the Scandinavian languages’ (primarily Norwegian and Swedish) long [oː] vowels, which in many varieties of Norwegian are typically monophthongal (cf. Endresen, 1988, p. 84), as the source for monophthongal English /o/ in the region. Thomas (2001) relies on the relatively large settlements of Scandinavian immigrants in the Upper Midwest to support the Scandinavian source of this feature, yet so far we lack tests of this hypothesis. This paper seeks to fill this gap by providing both acoustic and phonological data from heritage Norwegian speakers. These data are situated in a discussion of how vowel productions reflect dialect differences within Norwegian-American communities, which enriches analyses of the adoption of substrate features into this regional variety of American English.