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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. 389–405

On the Decrease of Language Norms in a Disintegrating Language

| Open University of the Netherlands
| Open University of the Netherlands
This paper deals with the issue of norm awareness in decaying American Dutch, the language of the ethnic Dutch in the American Midwest. It is investigated to what extent inflectional ‘mistakes’ are recognized. This investigation was carried out by means of an acceptability test. These findings are then compared with data from free conversation. Although this paper focuses on the decrease of language norms in the first place, it also contributes to a better understanding of heritage languages in their final stage, i.e., when they are on the verge of extinction.
Keywords: American Dutch, inflectional ‘mistakes’, norm awareness, reflection versus production, spontaneous purism, storage/irregularity
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
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https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.17smi
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