American Norwegian Research Articles

Dialectal Development and Comparison: Norwegian Dialects in the United States and Norway

Abstract: While a large body of scholarly literature on the influence of English on American Norwegian exists, the present report focuses on the impact Norwegian dialects, which vary vastly from one another, have had on each other in the postimmigration period during the twentieth century. This report on Norwegian dialects is contextualized within previous research on Norwegian, both in Norway and in North America. Using original interview recordings of heritage Norwegian speakers created by Terje Joranger and Odd Lovoll and interview transcripts from the Corpus of American Nordic Speech, a comparative dataset was created in order to analyze dialectal change over generations. The report focuses on three features of dialect variability in Norwegian that served as a proxy to determine dialectal membership: first and third pronoun use, the negation adverb, and question words. In synthesizing the information from this dataset and comparing research to modern scholarship, the findings aligned with previous research that heritage Norwegian has undergone an incomplete koinéization process that was interrupted by the language shift to English. At the end of this report, I discuss the possibility that modern Norwegian may be headed in a more leveled direction as well.

Definiteness marking in American Norwegian: a unique pattern among the Scandinavian languages

This paper examines definiteness marking in American Norwegian (AmNo), a heritage variety of Norwegian spoken in the US. The description adds another language to the much-studied variation within Scandinavian nominal phrases. It builds on established syntactic analysis of Scandinavian and investigates aspects that are (un)like Norwegian spoken in the homeland. A central finding is that the core syntax of Norwegian noun phrases is retained in AmNo, while the morphophonological spell-out is sometimes different. Indefinite determiners, for example, are obligatory in AmNo, but some speakers produce them with non-homeland-like gender agreement. One systematic change is observed: double definiteness has been partially lost. The typical AmNo modified definite phrase lacks the prenominal determiner that is obligatory for varieties in Norway. I argue that this is a syntactic change which allows the realization of D to be optional. This is a pattern not found in the other Scandinavian languages. At the same time, this innovative structure in AmNo is not like English, the dominant language of the AmNo speakers. This demonstrates heritage language change that is distinct from both the homeland language and the dominant language.

Stability in the integrated bilingual grammar: Tense exponency in North American Norwegian

AbstractDecades of research on bilingual grammars corroborate the integrated nature of these systems, leading to the conjecture that these representations are ‘shared’ (Marian & Spivey 2003, Kroll & Gollan 2014, Putnam et al. 2018). A specific population of bilinguals, namelyheritage language speakers, shows a tendency for highly variable allomorphy (Polinsky 2018, Putnam et al. 2021); however, with this aspect of grammar that is often in a state of flux, there are instances of stability. Here we thoroughly investigate the stability of tense allomorphy of in North American Norwegian (NAmNo), a moribund heritage language spoken in the Upper Midwestern United States. Formally, we build upon initial observations provided by Lykke (2020), showing how a late-insertion approach to the syntax–phonological interface in combination withevents, features, and precedence(EFP) phonology (Raimy 2000, Papillon 2020, Idsardi 2022) provides a straightforward account of the structural complexities that determine exponency in bilingual grammars.

Pragmaticalised determiners in American Norwegian

This paper discusses the determiners slik and sånn ‘such (a), like this/that’ in American Norwegian (AmNo), and the extent to which pragmaticalised uses of these determiners, carrying information about the speaker’s attitudes and speaker-hearer relations, can be found. It is shown that pragmaticalised determiners are used, but that their distribution differs in some respects from that in the homeland variety; notably, in AmNo, the lexical variant slik is more common than sånn. It is also shown that although pragmaticalised determiners are robustly attested (at least one subtype, described as a hedging marker), they are overall less frequent than in the homeland. However, the conditions on use of these markers are generally similar in both varieties.

American Norwegian derivational morphology in contact

Heritage languages (HLs) reliably exhibit morphological patterns prone to change and restructuring. Yet, American Norwegian appears to be remarkably stable in terms of structure, although with some surface variability. Contact patterns have nevertheless long been observed, where original English loanwords receive Norwegian inflectional morphology. Although there is robust evidence for inflectional patterns undergoing both variation and language mixing, there is less work on the outcomes of derivational processes in language contact. We investigate the impact of HL-bilingualism on American Norwegian derivational patterns. Our analysis of corpus data demonstrates a general lack of language mixing in derivations, which supports a long-standing observation in contact linguistics that this material is borrowed as whole lexical items rather than as individual morphemes. This work contributes to our understanding of the relationship between grammatical representations and contact-induced change, further demonstrating the insights into the architecture of bilingual morphosyntax that (moribund) heritage languages provide.

New perspectives on grammatical change in heritage Norwegian

This study introduces two speaker types, which have not yet been studied, to the study of heritage Norwegian: one adult (48, i.e., not elderly) and one adolescent speaker (16), “Kari” and “Jess”. They are both North American, English-dominant heritage speakers of Norwegian (AmNo), but differ from an older, previously studied cohort of American Norwegian speakers (old AmNo) in several respects. Kari and Jess have had more continuous contact with Norway throughout their lives. They are both Norwegian-literate and consume Norwegian-language media. Jess has attended Norwegian language courses in Norway, which motivates seeing her as a heritage language relearner. In this pilot study, we test the hypothesis that such extra-linguistic factors lead to grammatical differences between the groups. The hypothesis is tested by the analysis of three variables previously studied in old AmNo speakers: verb-second word order in non-subject initial clauses, possessive placement, and grammatical gender. We drew data from a 48-minute semi-structured speech recording. The study found that Kari and Jess indeed differ from old AmNo speakers. Kari’s language shows very little grammatical innovation, placing her among the most stable AmNo speakers. Jess’ language, in contrast, shows strongly innovative tendencies in all studied variables. To explain the innovations in Jess’ language, we appeal to heterogeneous input during childhood acquisition and cross-linguistic influence from English. Both factors, we argue, are active in the process of heritage language relearning.

Heritage languages in full circle

The papers in this volume are a collection of those presented at the 12th annual meeting of the Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas, a conference series co-founded by heritage language researchers from Norway and the United States. The collection of papers demonstrates the sharing of ideas and advancements in the field that have occured as an outcome of the research network’s annual conference and its dedicated and collaborative research members. Some papers make use of various components of the Corpus of American Norwegian Speech, some present results from a survey on postvernacular heritages languages and other sociolinguistic topics, while others focus on morphology and syntax of bilingual situations. The volume contains papers on Dutch, Frisian, German, Greek, Norwegian and Turkish in North America. Together, the collection can be considered a showcase of the state of the field of studies of heritage languages, languages that are non-dominant languages in a given setting, often with little local prestige.

New Data on Language Change: Compositional Definiteness in American Norwegian

Abstract This study investigates language change in American Norwegian (AmNo), a heritage language with a long migration and research history. Specifically, the paper examines the co-occurrence of a prenominal determiner and a suffixed article in modified definite phrases, known as compositional (or double) definiteness (CD). Recordings from three different points in time, recently made available in the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (Johannessen, 2015), are used to track historical developments. The data show that previous generations of speakers use CD in a homeland-like manner. Present-day speakers, on the other hand, frequently omit the determiner, which reflects a language change in this generation. I suggest that this innovation is preceded by a shift in the distributional frequency of exceptions to CD, which is intertwined with changes in language maintenance in the communities. Together, these factors contribute to the timing of the language change.

Stability and Change in the C-Domain in American Swedish

This article introduces American Swedish (AmSw) into the discussion of the C-domain in heritage Scandinavian. The study is based on spontaneous speech data from the Swedish part of the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS), compared to a baseline of homeland Swedish dialect speakers. We show that the C-domain in AmSw is primarily characterized by stability; this is evidenced by a relatively robust V2 syntax and left dislocation patterns that resemble the homeland baseline. However, we also show that AmSw diverges in some respects: there are some V2 violations and a stronger preference for SV clauses (subject-initial main clauses) at the expense of XVS clauses (non-subject-initial main clauses). These results are similar to previous findings from American Norwegian. We argue that the diverging patterns exhibited by AmSw speakers are not indicative of any fundamental change in their Swedish grammar. The occasional V2 violations are attributed to parallel activation of English and Swedish, and speakers sometimes failing to inhibit English, which is their dominant language. The increase of SV clauses is analyzed as a preference for the canonical word order of the dominant language, but within the limits of what the heritage grammar permits. The patterns in AmSw can be described as cases of attrition and cross-linguistic influence; however, we argue for a nuanced use of these terms.

When covert modality sneaks into your grammar: wh-infinitives in American Norwegian

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses wh-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien, 2021; Svenonius, 2016), we propose that wh-elements in AmNo can encode covert modality (similar to what is found in English indirect questions). We discuss these results and their impact on our understanding of the nature of syntactic change and the interaction of spanning in combination with Aʹ-movement in heritage language syntax.

Compound-Internal Language Mixing in American Norwegian

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.

The Tale of Two Lexicons: Decomposing Complexity across a Distributed Lexicon

Abstract The notion of complexity is evasive and often left to intuition, yet it is often invoked when studying heritage language grammars. In this article, we propose a first pass at decomposing the notion of complexity into smaller components in a formal grammatical model. In particular, we argue that a distributed model of the lexicon (i.e., one that assumes that principles that generate both words and phrases are one and the same) allows us to identify three components: syntactic features, the hierarchical organization of features, and the mapping between syntactic features and their exponents. Based on grammatical gender in different language pairs, in particular the heritage language American Norwegian (AmNo), we illustrate how this distributed model can account for developments in heritage language grammars whereby the grammatical gender system is considered to have become less complex. More generally, the article demonstrates that a distributed architecture is better suited empirically and theoretically as a heuristic to understand complexity effects in heritage grammars and beyond.

Split possession and definiteness marking in American Norwegian

AbstractThis article discusses definiteness marking in two possessive constructions that exhibit special patterns (split possession) for certain kinship nouns in Norwegian. It is shown that the special patterns, whereby the relevant nouns appear without a definite suffix, are retained by the majority speakers of American Norwegian (AmNo); some AmNo speakers use them even more extensively than homeland speakers, and only a minority do not use them. The forms without the suffix are analysed as a reflex of apossfeature that is a part of the featural make-up of certain kinship nouns (Julien 2005). I argue that the most conspicuous differences in distribution of this feature in the homeland vs. the heritage variety have emerged through a combination of decline in homeland Norwegian and retention and even extension in AmNo. The development in AmNo seems to be systematic and principled; it does not involve “loss” or incompleteness (e.g., Yager et al. 2015; Kupisch & Rothman 2016; Bayram et al. 2019).

Mismatches at the syntax-semantics interface: The case of non-finite complementation in American Norwegian

AbstractNon-finite complementation strategies found in American Norwegian (AmNo) (made available by the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS)) reveal unique and diverging patterns when compared to both standard and dialectal Norwegian and English. We argue in this paper that the majority of these divergent structures are the result of overextension (Rinke & Flores, 2014; Rinke et al., 2018; Putnam & Hoffman, 2021; Kupisch, 2014), where heritage language speakers produce structures that differ from both grammars in an attempt to generate forms that are distinct from the more dominant language. Our treatment of these nuanced structures in AmNo shows that this heritage grammar significantly restricts bare (ornaked) TPs (Situations) serving as non-finite complements. To avoid bare TP-complements, AmNo has developed two distinct, yet related strategies, (1) reducing non-finite complements tovPs (Events), or (2) incorporating an additional element, a preposition, to ensure that the non-finite complement functions as the object of a preposition. We analyze this latter strategy as an instance of the emergence of structural salience (Polinsky, 2018) in the syntax of AmNo and suggest that this variation is best understood as a syntax–semantics interface phenomenon.

Variation and stability of American Norwegian /r/ in contact

Abstract Sound patterns in heritage languages are often highly variable, potentially with influences from majority languages. Yet, the core phonological system of the heritage language tends to remain stable. This article considers variation in the phonetic and phonological patterns of /r/ in American Norwegian heritage language speakers from neighboring communities in western Wisconsin, in the Upper Midwestern United States. Drawing on acoustic data from speakers born between 1879 and 1957, I examine the distribution of four rhotic allophones, including an English-like approximant, over time. These data reveal an increase of approximants that is structured within the Norwegian phonological system and its processes. Furthermore, analyzing these changes with the proposed modular framework provides clarity for how heritage language sound systems do and do not change under contact and contributes to our understanding of the asymmetric phonetic and phonological heritage language patterns.

American Norwegian discourse marking: Convergence, detachability, pragmatic change

This paper provides a first picture of discourse marking in American Norwegian, drawing on word order data and native speaker judgments. Like many others since Salmons (1990), we see convergence between the systems of bilinguals, increasing similarities at the expense of differences. Matras (1988) and Fuller (2001) argue that more ‘pragmatically detachable’ material is more easily borrowed, like well / vel vs. you know / vet du. Our results partially align with this expectation, but with a wrinkle: less pragmatically detachable material appears to be borrowed where the two languages have similar pre-existing markers (namely vet du / you know). We find more convergence, regardless of detachability, at points of similarity than of difference (e.g. English anyhow, which has no close Norwegian parallel.) This suggests that convergence may play the bigger role here, so that less detachable forms may be more borrowable in converging systems.

Crossing borders to enhance our understanding of variation in heritage languages

The ‘Norwegian in America’ project, led by Janne Bondi Johannessen, has provided continued inspiration and access to document and study American Norwegian. This has contributed to a growing body of research on morpho¬syntax and, to a lesser extent, phonetics-phonology. Using compositional definiteness as an illustration, we show the benefits of incorporating these two perspectives to analyse variation in heritage languages. We strive for a holistic approach to two examples in order to demonstrate how variation in each grammatical domain interacts. In one case, this leads to an enriched understanding of the data, whereas the other case highlights an explicit need for future research. We believe that further work that includes both morphosyntax and phonetics-phonology is fruitful for our understanding of how multiple language domains interact in a heritage language setting.

Mot en trebank for amerikanorsk

This article presents a method for automatic assignment of syntactic dependency relations to the corpus of American Norwegian speech (CANS). Different machine learning techniques and corpora are used. Finally, an accuracy measure is computed and compared with a relatively new treebank for spoken Norwegian.

American Norwegian Sound Systems and Language Contact

American Norwegian Sound Systems and Language Contact

Stability and attrition in American Norwegian nominals: a view from predicate nouns

This study investigates the extent to which speakers of American Norwegian (AmNo), a heritage language spoken in the United States and Canada, use the indefinite article in classifying predicate constructions (‘He is (a) doctor’). Despite intense contact with English, which uses the indefinite article, most AmNo speakers have retained bare nouns, i.e., the pattern of Norwegian as spoken in Norway. However, a minority of the speakers use the indefinite article to some extent. I argue that generally, this use of the indefinite article has arisen through attrition (i.e., a change during the lifetime of individuals), not through divergent attainment causing systematic, parametric change in the Norwegian grammar of these speakers. I also argue that representational economy is one of the factors that may have contributed to the relative stability of bare nouns.