The Vowel System of a Norwegian Dialect in Wisconsin

Abstract

1. Most speakers of Norwegian in the Middle West belong to the farming class.' Nearly all are bilingual, and many of them handle the English language better than the Norwegian. It is often easy to detect their Scandinavian background in listening to their English, even in the case of secondor third-generation Americans. They were usually educated in a grade school and a NorwegianLutheran parochial school. The parochial school, until relatively recent times, was conducted in Norwegian; the children were taught to read and write the language. As a result, only the youngest speakers of Norwegian are without any knowledge of its literary form. Literary Dano-Norwegian is still used in church services, and is the familiar form of the language to those of the city population who cultivate the idiom of their ancestors in the Sons of Norway lodges; but the country communities use dialects almost exclusively. As a rule, a community has only one main dialect. The pioneers preferred to settle with people from their own district in Norway; if people from two districts settled close together, the dialect that counted the larger number of speakers usually replaced the other. Dialect mixtures is seldom to be found except in individual speakers; only one case has been reported where a mixed dialect seems to be the language of a community. Only the largest settlements, for instance the Koshkonong settlement near Madison, have maintained several dialects with equal prestige. The dialects have been influenced by American English (chiefly in the form of loanwords) to a very large extent, so much in fact that newcomers from Norway often find it difficult to understand the speakers. This is true even if the newcomer knows English; for most English words, including a large part of those most commonly used in American Norwegian, do not sound English in a Norwegian context, and the speaker is often unaware that such-and-such a word is not pure Norwegian. It is this phonemic aspect of the loanwords that will be dealt with here.