Germanic Heritage Languages in North America

Acquisition, attrition and change

Editors

Janne Bondi Johannessen | University of Oslo

Joseph C. Salmons | University of Wisconsin

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027234988 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

e-Book – Open Access Download from our e-platform

ISBN 9789027268198

This book presents new empirical findings about Germanic heritage varieties spoken in North America: Dutch, German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, West Frisian and Yiddish, and varieties of English spoken both by heritage speakers and in communities after language shift. The volume focuses on three critical issues underlying the notion of ‘heritage language’: acquisition, attrition and change. The book offers theoretically-informed discussions of heritage language processes across phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics and the lexicon, in addition to work on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and contact settings. With this, the volume also includes a variety of frameworks and approaches, synchronic and diachronic. Most European Germanic languages share some central linguistic features, such as V2, gender and agreement in the nominal system, and verb inflection. As minority languages faced with a majority language like English, similarities and differences emerge in patterns of variation and change in these heritage languages. These empirical findings shed new light on mechanisms and processes.

[Studies in Language Variation, 18] 2015. vi, 418 pp.

Publishing status: Available

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18

Table of Contents

The study of Germanic heritage languages in the Americas

Janne Bondi Johannessen and Joseph C. Salmons | pp. 1–18

Part I. Acquisition and attrition

Word Order Variation in Norwegian Possessive Constructions: Bilingual Acquisition and Attrition

Marit Westergaard and Merete Anderssen | pp. 21–45

Attrition in an American Norwegian Heritage Language Speaker

Janne Bondi Johannessen | pp. 46–71

Reexamining Icelandic as a Heritage Language in North America

Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir | pp. 72–93

Part II. Phonetic and phonological change

Heritage Language Obstruent Phonetics and Phonology: American Norwegian and Norwegian-American English

Brent Allen and Joseph C. Salmons | pp. 97–116

The History of Front Rounded Vowels in New Braunfels German

Marc Pierce, Hans C. Boas and Karen A. Roesch | pp. 117–132

Part III. (Morpho-)syntactic and pragmatic change

Functional Convergence and Extension in Contact: Syntactic and Semantic Attributes of the Progressive Aspect in Pennsylvania Dutch

Josh Brown and Michael T. Putnam | pp. 135–160

Hybrid Verb Forms in American Norwegian and the Analysis of the Syntactic Relation between the Verb and its Tense

Tor A. Åfarli | pp. 161–177

Discourse Markers in the Narratives of New York Hasidim: More V2 Attrition

Zelda Kahan Newman | pp. 178–198

Part IV. Lexical change

Maintaining a Multilingual Repertoire: Lexical Change in American Norwegian

Lucas Annear and Kristin Speth | pp. 201–216

How Synagogues Became Shuls: The Boomerang Effect in Yiddish-Influenced English, 1895-2010

Sarah Bunin Benor | pp. 217–233

Phonological Non-integration of Lexical Borrowings in Wisconsin West Frisian

Todd Ehresmann and Joshua Bousquette | pp. 234–255

Borrowing Modal Elements into American Norwegian: The Case of suppose(d)

Kristin Melum Eide and Arnstein Hjelde | pp. 256–280

Part V. Variation and real-time change

Changes in a Norwegian Dialect in America

Arnstein Hjelde | pp. 283–298

On Two Myths of the Norwegian Language in America: Is it Old-Fashioned? Is it Approaching the Written Bokmål Standard?

Janne Bondi Johannessen and Signe Laake | pp. 299–322

Coon Valley Norwegians Meet Norwegians from Norway: Language, Culture and Identity among Heritage Language Speakers in the U. S.

Anne Golden and Elizabeth Lanza | pp. 323–358

Variation and Change in American Swedish

Ida Larsson, Sofia Tingsell and Maia Andréasson | pp. 359–388

On the Decrease of Language Norms in a Disintegrating Language

Caroline Smits and Jaap van Marle | pp. 389–405

Index of languages and dialects | pp. 407–408

Index of authors | pp. 409–413

Index of subjects | pp. 415–418

“The volume makes an excellent contribution both to the study of heritage languages and language contact, and to Germanic linguistics. While each of the articles could easily stand alone as a valuable scholarly contribution in another forum, a synergy is created from bringing them together in a single volume. The foci and methodologies of the articles are quite distinct, yet from the totality of the collection the reader emerges with a deeper understanding of the larger picture of the dynamics and the nuts-and-bolts of heritage languages in North America [...].”

Neil G. Jacobs, Ohio State University, in Journal of Language Contact 11:1 (2018)

“This volume provides useful empirical data and updated perspectives on languages that have often been studied as local or regional phenomena [...].”

In Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 2018

Cited by (26)

Cited by 26 other publications

Order by:

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2024. Exploring past and present layers of multilingualism in Flemish-emigrant writing. In Investigating West Germanic Languages [Studies in Germanic Linguistics, 8], ► pp. 276 ff.

Heegård Petersen, Jan

2024. Enhanced coarticulatory labialization of /ts/ in Argentine Danish. Nordic Journal of Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff.

Sanz-Sánchez, Israel

2024. Chapter 1. Language acquisition across the lifespan in historical sociolinguistics. In Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 14], ► pp. 2 ff.

Eide, Kristin Melum & Arnstein Hjelde

2023. Linguistic Repertoires: Modeling Variation in Input and Production: A Case Study on American Speakers of Heritage Norwegian. Languages 8:1 ► pp. 49 ff.

Fridman, Clara & Natalia Meir

2023. A Portrait of Lexical Knowledge among Adult Hebrew Heritage Speakers Dominant in American English: Evidence from Naming and Narrative Tasks. Languages 8:1 ► pp. 36 ff.

Laleko, Oksana

2023. 5. The Roadmap of Heritage Language Research in North America. Publication of the American Dialect Society 108:1 ► pp. 95 ff.

Dehé, Nicole & Tanja Kupisch

2022. Prepositional phrases and case in North American (heritage) Icelandic. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 45:3 ► pp. 254 ff.

Kinn, Kari & Ida Larsson

2022. Pronominal demonstratives in homeland and heritage Scandinavian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 45:3 ► pp. 281 ff.

Larsson, Ida & Kari Kinn

2022. Stability and Change in the C-Domain in American Swedish. Languages 7:4 ► pp. 256 ff.

Johannessen, Janne Bondi & Joseph Salmons

2021. Germanic Heritage Varieties in the Americas. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 252 ff.

Lohndal, Terje

2021. Syntax of Heritage Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 644 ff.

van Baal, Yvonne & David Natvig

2021. Introduction to the special issue on Heritage languages & Bilingualism. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 44:2 ► pp. 99 ff.

Johannessen, Janne Bondi & Michael T. Putnam

2020. Heritage Germanic Languages in North America. In The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics, ► pp. 783 ff.

Kinn, Kari

2020. Stability and attrition in American Norwegian nominals: a view from predicate nouns. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 23:1 ► pp. 3 ff.

Kinn, Kari

2021. Split possession and definiteness marking in American Norwegian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 44:2 ► pp. 182 ff.

López, Luis

2020. Case, Concord and the Emergence of Default. Languages 5:2 ► pp. 12 ff.

Petersen, Jan Heegård, Gert Foget Hansen & Jacob Thøgersen

2020. Correlations between linguistic change and linguistic performance among heritage speakers of Danish in Argentina. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10:5 ► pp. 690 ff.

Khamis-Dakwar, Reem, May Ahmar & Karen Froud

2019. Palestinian Arabic dual formation in typically developing heritage speakers of Palestinian Arabic. In Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXI [Studies in Arabic Linguistics, 8], ► pp. 207 ff.

Lindemann, Luke

2019. When Wurst comes to Wurscht: Variation and koiné formation in Texas German. Journal of Linguistic Geography 7:01 ► pp. 33 ff.

ANDERSSEN, MERETE, BJÖRN LUNDQUIST & MARIT WESTERGAARD

2018. Cross-linguistic similarities and differences in bilingual acquisition and attrition: Possessives and double definiteness in Norwegian heritage language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 21:4 ► pp. 748 ff.

Annick De Houwer & Lourdes Ortega

2018. The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism,

Dehé, Nicole

2018. The Intonation of Polar Questions in North American (“Heritage”) Icelandic. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 30:3 ► pp. 213 ff.

Putnam, Michael T., Tanja Kupisch & Diego Pascual y Cabo

2018. Chapter 12. Different situations, similar outcomes. In Bilingual Cognition and Language [Studies in Bilingualism, 54], ► pp. 251 ff.

Riksem, Brita

2017. Language Mixing and Diachronic Change: American Norwegian Noun Phrases Then and Now. Languages 2:2 ► pp. 3 ff.

[no author supplied]

2021. Heritage Languages around the World. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 11 ff.

[no author supplied]

2021. Grammatical Aspects of Heritage Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 579 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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