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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. 299–322

On Two Myths of the Norwegian Language in America

Is it Old-Fashioned? Is it Approaching the Written Bokmål Standard?

| University of Oslo
| 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.

Keywords: Bokmål, comparisons with European Norwegian, grammar, heritage Norwegian, vocabulary
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.18.14joh
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URLs

Lexicographical Bokmål Corpus [URL]
Nordic Dialect Corpus [URL]
Oslo Corpus of Tagged Norwegian Texts, the Nynorsk Part [URL]
Cited by

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Hjelde, Arnstein
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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
Kinn, Kari
2021. Split possession and definiteness marking in American Norwegian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 44:2 ► pp. 182 ff. DOI logo
Lohndal, Terje & Marit Westergaard
2016. Grammatical Gender in American Norwegian Heritage Language: Stability or Attrition?. Frontiers in Psychology 7 DOI logo
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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
Zuban, Yulia, Maria Martynova, Sabine Zerbian, Luka Szucsich & Natalia Gagarina
2021. Word order in heritage Russian: clause type and majority language matter. Russian Linguistics 45:3 ► pp. 253 ff. DOI logo

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