Cover not available
Part of
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. 283–298

Changes in a Norwegian Dialect in America

In this article I investigate dialect variation in the old Norwegian settlement around Coon Valley and Westby in Vernon County, Wisconsin, with a focus on how the Norwegian dialects spoken here have changed over time. The language in this community is well documented; the oldest recordings are from 1931, the most recent ones were done in 2014. By comparing such recordings from different times, I point to some tendencies of how different Norwegian speech varieties have changed in the settlement towards the formation of a koiné.

Keywords: change in morphology, change in phonology, heritage language, koiné, koinéization, language change, Norwegian dialects
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].

Published online: 20 August 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.13hje
References (37)
Åfarli, Tor A
This volume. “Hybrid Verb Forms in American Norwegian and the Analysis of the Syntactic Relation Between the Verb and its Tense.”
Allen, Brent and Joseph Salmons
This volume. “Heritage Language Obstruent Phonetics and Phonology: American Norwegian and Norwegian-American English.”
Annear, Lucas and Kristin Speth
This volume. “Maintaining a Multilingual Repertoire: Lexical Change in American Norwegian.”
Flaten, Nils
1900–04 “Notes on the American-Norwegian with Vocabulary. Dialect Notes 2: 115–126.Google Scholar
Flom, George. T
1900–04 “English Elements in Norse Dialects of Utica, Wisconsin.” Dialect Notes 2: 257–268.Google Scholar
Flom, George T
1903 “The Gender of Norse Loan-Nouns in Norse Dialects in America.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 5: 1–31.Google Scholar
1912 “Det norske sprogs bruk og utvikling i Amerika.” Nordmands- Forbundet 4: 233–250.Google Scholar
1926 “English Loanwords in American Norwegian. As spoken in the Koshkonong Settlement, Wisconsin.” American Speech 1: 541–558. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1929 “On the Phonology of English Loanwords in the Norwegian Dialects of Koshkonong in Wisconsin.” Arkiv for Nordisk Filologi – Tilläggsband til bd. XL: 178–189.Google Scholar
1931 “Um det norske målet i Amerika.” Norsk aarbok: 113–124.Google Scholar
Golden, Anne and Elizabeth Lanza
This volume. “Coon Valley Norwegians Meet Norwegians from Norway: Language, Culture and Identity Among Heritage Language Speakers in the U.S.”
Haugen, Einar
1956 Bilingualism in the Americas: A Bibliography and Research Guide. (Publications of the American Dialect Society 26). Tuscaloosa, AL: University Alabama Press.Google Scholar
(1953) 1969 The Norwegian Language in America. Bloomington / London: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Hjelde, Arnstein
1992 Trøndsk talemål i Amerika. Trondheim: Tapir.Google Scholar
1996a “The Gender of English Nouns Used in American Norwegian.” In Language Contact Across the North Atlantic, ed. by P. Sture Ureland and Iain Clarkson, 297–312. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1996b “Some Phonological Changes in a Norwegian Dialect in America.” In Language Contact Across the North Atlantic, ed. by P. Sture Ureland and Iain Clarkson, 283–295. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holand, Hjalmar R
1927 Coon Prairie: en historisk beretning om den Norske evangeliske lutherske menighet paa Coon Prairie. Skrevet i anledning av dens 75-aarsfest i 1927. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House.Google Scholar
1928 Coon Valley: en historisk beretning om de norske menigheter i Coon Valley, skrevet i anledning av kaldets 75-aarsfest i 1928. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House.Google Scholar
Hjelde, Arnstein
2012 “”Folkan mine, dæm bære snakka norsk” – norsk i Wisconsin frå 1940-talet og fram til i dag.” Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 30(2): 183–203.Google Scholar
Ibarra, Robert A
1976 Ethnicity Genuine and Spurious – A Study of a Norwegian Community in Rural Wisconsin. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin-Madison dissertation.Google Scholar
Johannessen, Janne Bondi
This volume. “Attrition in an American Norwegian Heritage Language Speaker.”
Johannessen, Janne Bondi and Signe Laake
2012 “To myter om det norske språket i Amerika: Er det gammeldags? Nærmer det seg en bokmålsstandard?” Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 30(2): 204–228.Google Scholar
This volume. “On Two Myths of the Norwegian Language in America: Is it Old-Fashioned? Is it Approaching the Written Bokmål Standard?”
Kartsamling for leksikografi [URL] (Accessed February 12, 2011) [A collection of detailed dialect maps from Norway.]
Kerswill, Paul
2002 “Koineization and Accommodation.” In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. by J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes, 669–702. Blackwell: Oxford.Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul and Peter Trudgill
2005 “The Birth of New Dialects.” In Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages, ed. by Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens and Paul Kerswill, 196–220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larsson, Ida, Sofia Tingsell and Maia Andréasson
This Volume. “Variation and Change in American Swedish.”
Munch, Peter A
1949 “Social Adjustment Among Wisconsin Norwegians.” American Sociological Review 14(6): 780–787. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1954 “Segregation and Assimilation of Norwegian Settlements in Wisconsin.” Norwegian-American Studies and Records 18: 102–140.Google Scholar
Oftedal, Magne
1949a “Norsk talemål i Amerika.” Syn og segn 55: 195–203.Google Scholar
1949b “The Vowel System of a Norwegian Dialect in Wisconsin.” Language 25: 261–267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Qualey, Carlton Chester
1938 Norwegian Settlement in the United States. Northfield: NAHA.Google Scholar
Seifert, Lester W.J
1993 “The Development and Survival of the German Language in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In The German Language in American, 1683–1991, ed. by Joseph C. Salmons, 322–337. Madison: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies.Google Scholar
Synopsisen [URL] (Accessed February 12, 2011) [A collection of detailed information on pronunciation and morphology from each Norwegian county (kommune).]
Trudgill, Peter J., Elizabeth Gordon, Gillian Lewis and Margaret Maclagan
2000 “Determinism in New-Dialect Formation and the Genesis of New Zealand English.” Journal of Linguistics 36: 299–318. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
US Census Bureau
2000 US Census, Special Tabulation 224.
Westergaard, Marit and Merete Anderssen
This volume. “Word Order Variation in Norwegian Possessive Constructions: Bilingual Acquisition and Attrition.”
Cited by (14)

Cited by 14 other publications

Ivaska, Ilmari, Mirva Johnson & Tommi Kurki
2023. Identifying the dialectal background of American Finnish speakers using a supervised machine-learning model. Nordic Journal of Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Laleko, Oksana
2023. 5. The Roadmap of Heritage Language Research in North America. Publication of the American Dialect Society 108:1 ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo
Kinn, Kari & Ida Larsson
2022. Pronominal demonstratives in homeland and heritage Scandinavian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 45:3 ► pp. 281 ff. DOI logo
Putnam, Michael & Åshild Søfteland
2022. When covert modality sneaks into your grammar:wh-infinitives in American Norwegian. Second Language Research ► pp. 026765832211037 ff. DOI logo
Johannessen, Janne Bondi & Joseph Salmons
2021. Germanic Heritage Varieties in the Americas. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 252 ff. DOI logo
Kinn, Kari
2021. Split possession and definiteness marking in American Norwegian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 44:2 ► pp. 182 ff. DOI logo
Johannessen, Janne Bondi & Michael T. Putnam
2020. Heritage Germanic Languages in North America. In The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics, ► pp. 783 ff. DOI logo
Hjelde, Arnstein, Bjørn Harald Kvifte, Linda Evenstad Emilsen & Ragnar Arntzen
2019. Chapter 8. Processability Theory as a tool in the study of a heritage speaker of Norwegian. In Widening Contexts for Processability Theory [Processability Approaches to Language Acquisition Research & Teaching, 7], ► pp. 185 ff. DOI logo
Allen, Brent & Joseph C. Salmons
2015. Heritage Language Obstruent Phonetics and Phonology. In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 97 ff. DOI logo
Johannessen, Janne Bondi
2015. Attrition in an American Norwegian Heritage Language Speaker. In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 46 ff. DOI logo
Johannessen, Janne Bondi
2018. Factors of variation, maintenance and change in Scandinavian heritage languages. International Journal of Bilingualism 22:4 ► pp. 447 ff. DOI logo
Johannessen, Janne Bondi & Signe Laake
2015. On Two Myths of the Norwegian Language in America. In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 299 ff. DOI logo
Westergaard, Marit & Merete Anderssen
2015. Word Order Variation in Norwegian Possessive Constructions. In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 21 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Heritage Languages around the World. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 11 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 june 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.