Norwegian across the Americas

Over recent years, Norwegian as spoken in North America has received considerable attention. This language, which is spoken by the descendants of emigrants who left Norway in the 19^th and 20^th century, is a heritage language. Heritage languages are acquired and used in the home, but they are not the dominant language of the larger, national community. Heritage speakers are often descendants of migrants, and they represent an extremely interesting form of bilingualism: The heritage language is their first language in terms of order of acquisition, but it is not their dominant language when they reach adulthood. 

The research on heritage Norwegian in North America (USA and Canada) has made significant progress; however, some important issues remain understudied. This project deals with two of them.

First, the project will, as the first of its kind, investigate a new variety of heritage Norwegian, namely Norwegian as spoken in Latin America. Between 1820 and the 1950s, c. 10,000 Norwegians emigrated to Latin America, and Norwegian is still present as a heritage language. Studies of this language will pave the way for comparative research on heritage Norwegian in different contact situations, as the contact language in Latin America is Spanish, not English. This, in turn, can shed new light on the effects of language contact and help us understand whether a linguistic innovation is a result of direct influence from another language, or more general processes of change. Latin American Norwegian data will be collected through interviews with speakers of Norwegian heritage in Argentina and Chile.

Second, the project will study in depth how heritage Norwegian in North America has developed over time by making use of a unique resource, namely recordings of previous generations of North American Norwegian speakers made by the linguists Einar Haugen, Didrik A. Seip and Ernst Selmer in the 1930s and 1940s. A number of these recordings will be transcribed and tagged, facilitating direct searches for various grammatical phenomena. This can help us understand whether innovations in today’s North American Norwegian were i) already present in the previous generation; ii) represents a systematic change between generations, or iii) is a result of attrition, i.e. loss of linguistic skills over the lifespan.