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Keeping in Touch: Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world
Edited by Raymond Hickey
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 10] 2019
► pp. 27–41

Chapter 2
Wisconsin immigrant letters

German transfer to Wisconsin English

This chapter outlines German transfer to Wisconsin English based on the analysis of ego-documents written by German immigrants and their descendants to Wisconsin in the nineteenth century. The analysis of 111 letters from four generations of a German-American family revealed 450 instances indicative of German transfer to English. Using these documents, we show how native German speakers learning English transferred German-like features and structures (phonological, syntactic, and semantic transfer) to their English and how some of these transfers remain in the regional English today. This is supplemented by an additional 101 letters from another family and their acquaintances in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. These additional documents exhibit similar patterns of transfer, indicating that the transfer is not due to regional differences, but likely due to other factors such as generational language shift.
Keywords: Wisconsin German, Wisconsin English, substratal transfer, phonological transfer, syntactic transfer, lexical transfer
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Linguistic transfer
    • 1.2Nineteenth-century migration to Wisconsin
    • 1.3Early adopters of English: The Krueger family
  • 2.Phonological transfer
    • 2.1Final neutralization
    • 2.2Final neutralization hypercorrection
  • 3.Syntactic transfer
    • 3.1Topicalization
    • 3.2 To-infinitival transfer
    • 3.3Like + to-infinitival
  • 4.Semantic transfer
    • 4.1Lassen
    • 4.2Noch
    • 4.3Bei
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10.02bag
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Litty, Samantha
2024. Chapter 10. Language dominance across the lifespan in Wisconsin German and English varieties. In Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 14], ► pp. 234 ff. DOI logo
Litty, Samantha, Jennifer Mercer & Joseph C. Salmons
2019. Chapter 7. Early immigrant English. In Processes of Change [Studies in Language Variation, 21], ► pp. 115 ff. DOI logo

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