Article published in:
Germanic Heritage Languages in North America: Acquisition, attrition and changeEdited by Janne Bondi Johannessen † and Joseph C. Salmons
[Studies in Language Variation 18] 2015
► pp. 299–322
On Two Myths of the Norwegian Language in America
Is it Old-Fashioned? Is it Approaching the Written Bokmål Standard?
Janne Bondi Johannessen | University of Oslo
Signe Laake | University of Oslo
The article discusses two claims about Heritage Norwegian in the American Midwest. One is that the Norwegian-speaking descendants of Norwegian immigrants speak an ‘archaic’ form of Norwegian. The other is that their language approaches the written Norwegian Bokmål standard, i.e., has moved away from the dialects spoken by original immigrants. Evidence from the lexicon and grammar help answer the questions in the title. The answer to the first question is partly positive, depending on what aspects of language are focussed on, while the answer to the second one is negative.
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.18.14joh
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.14joh
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Lexicographical Bokmål Corpus http://www.hf.uio.no/iln/tjenester/kunnskap/samlinger/bokmal/veiledningkorpus/index.html
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Hjelde, Arnstein
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Zuban, Yulia, Maria Martynova, Sabine Zerbian, Luka Szucsich & Natalia Gagarina
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