Phonological Shifting in American Norwegian

Abstract

Problems connected with the borrowing of words from language to language have occupied the attention of many linguists. In most cases this attention has been focused on languages of the remote past, where opportunity for first-hand phonetic observation has been cut off entirely. In the meanwhile borrowing has been going on within the United States on a scale rarely equalled in history, between English on the one hand and all the immigrant languages on the other. Here it becomes possible to record by modern means and to study by modern methods the phonetic form of each word in each of its incarnations, foreign, American, or hybrid. In the following study of one such dialect the writer wishes to present a concrete instance of the possibilities inherent in this kind of research. My informant concerning the particular dialect of American Norwegian here discussed is Mr. Odin Anderson, a student at the University of Wisconsin without previous training in linguistics, whose interest had been aroused to the extent that he spent many weary hours preparing a tentatively complete list of the words employed in his Norwegian dialect. That this list is not actually complete is shown by the fact that it contains only some 5500 words (of which about 1300 are English loanwords), which is probably too little for any actual language. In spite of this, it must be regarded as an impressive contribution toward complete knowledge of this very interesting dialect. The gathering of words has reached a point at which new words do not suggest themselves easily, but come to mind only rarely and fortuitously. This vocabulary represents the speech of a specific family living near the town of Blair in western Wisconsin, in the midst of a solidly Norwegian country community. No living member of this family has ever seen Norway,' and my informant is a third generation immigrant. His grandfather and greatgrandfather emigrated from Norway and