AmNorSSC · American Norwegian Sound Systems and Language Contact

American Norwegian Sound Systems and Language Contact

Between the 1820s and 1930s over 800,000 Norwegians immigrated to the United States, often creating or settling in Norwegian-speaking communities particularly in the American Upper Midwest. Many of these communities were considerably resistant to adopting English and up until the early 20th century, Norwegian was often learned in the home and spoken within the local community, what we refer to as a heritage language. Heritage languages often develop into distinct varieties of their own and American Norwegian is no exception: it survives as American dialects of Norwegian, with a clearly English-influenced vocabulary and various grammatical differences. By focusing on American Norwegian this project aims to advance the fields of language contact and language variation and change with a comprehensive study of bilingual sound patterns. In particular, this project investigates the extent to which American Norwegian speakers adopt speech sounds from English, and, if so, how those patterns change over time as these communities became more English-dominant. The results inform debates on the composition of bilingual grammar and the extent to which structures in one language, in this case sound systems, may or may not remain intact under intense contact with another. It thus contributes to the understanding of the human capacity for language in a broader sense. American Norwegian speakers are typically elderly individuals who adopted English as a primary mode of communication during childhood or early adolescence. Accordingly, their speech patterns in both Norwegian and English provide critical evidence that enriches our understanding of the ways in which the language can and does change over the course of an individual’s lifespan. By building on theoretical approaches that unify phonological and language contact theories, this project constitutes a significant contribution to the field and facilitates future research on language acquisition and bilingualism, language processing, and language maintenance/attrition over the lifespan. The overarching objectives of this project are to investigate the effects of Norwegian-English bilingualism on the American Norwegian sound patterns, and to what extent those effects are constrained by each language system.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз