Article published in:
Germanic Heritage Languages in North America: Acquisition, attrition and change
Edited by Janne Bondi Johannessen † and Joseph C. Salmons
[Studies in Language Variation 18] 2015
► pp. 97–116

Heritage Language Obstruent Phonetics and Phonology

American Norwegian and Norwegian-American English

| University of Wisconsin–Madison
| University of Wisconsin–Madison
This chapter explores the acoustics and phonology of speech sounds produced by Norwegian heritage speakers in the Upper Midwest in Norwegian and to a lesser extent in English. The study reports work on acoustic differences in obstruents spoken by heritage speakers whose L1 and L2 are both ‘aspiration’ languages, namely Norwegian and American English, but which differ phonologically in other ways. Our focus falls in particular on laryngeal features, that is, the realization of the distinction between ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ or ‘lenis’ and ‘fortis’ consonants, along with the closely related issue of durational contrasts in Norwegian. Building on Allen and Salmons (2012), we argue that the Norwegian and English spoken by Norwegian-American bilinguals will each show influence from the other language, but asymmetrically.
Keywords: aspiration, duration, laryngeal phonetics, laryngeal phonology, passive voicing, sonorant devoicing
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 rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 20 August 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.04all
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

No author info given
2019.  In Heritage Languages [Studies in Bilingualism, 58], Crossref logo
Hjelde, Arnstein
2015.  In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 283 ff. Crossref logo
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. Crossref logo
Pierce, Marc, Hans C. Boas & Karen A. Roesch
2015.  In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 117 ff. Crossref logo
Putnam, Michael T., Tanja Kupisch & Diego Pascual y Cabo
2018.  In Bilingual Cognition and Language [Studies in Bilingualism, 54], ► pp. 251 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 04 may 2021. 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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