1 Norwegian in the American Midwest

Norwegian in the American Midwest: A common lexicolect Janne Bondi Johannessen* and Signe Laake** *MultiLing, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies ** Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages University of Oslo Abstract The American Midwest is an area that stretches over huge distances. Yet it seems that the Norwegian language in this whole area has some similarities, particularly at the lexical level. Comparisons of three types of vocabulary across the whole area, as well as across time, building on accounts in the previous literature from Haugen (1953) onwards, are carried out. The results of these comparisons convince the authors that it is justified to refer to this language as one lexically defined dialect, which we call lexicolect. Keywords: Heritage Norwegian, loanwords, types of words, one common language variety, different dialects, koiné, diglossia, lexicolect 1. Introduction1 During the first fieldwork the present authors undertook in 2010, an unfamiliar use of certain words came to our attention. This was all the more noticeable since it happened across vast distances in the American Midwest. That a new speech variety can develop in a close-knit community is not surprising. It is also possible to see how members of a society tied together by mass media, especially radio, television and social media, can develop a common language variety. However, when people live far apart in a vast and sparsely populated area like the American Midwest, one would have thought it less likely that the language would develop common linguistic features. Add to this that travel was hard, expensive and time-consuming, and the relevant mass media only existed in print. Yet the Norwegian Heritage language as it developed from approximately 1850 to 1950 did have a common linguistic development at word level. The goal of this paper is to show that Heritage Norwegian communities have three types of lexical development in common: a) words borrowed from English to coin concepts that were unknown in the old country, b) words borrowed from English to replace Norwegian words, and c) word meanings borrowed from English onto Norwegian 1 We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for very constructive comments. We are also grateful to Arnstein Hjelde, Joe Salmons, Helge Sandøy and Øystein Alexander Vangsnes, as well as participants at Nionde nordiska dialektologkonferensen in Uppsala, 18.-20. August 2010, and at the workshop Languages abroad, Gothenburg, 24.-25. October 2012 (organised by Maia Andreasson, Christiane Andresen and Benjamin Lyngfelt), for useful comments. We would also like to thank all our wonderful informants. Without them this work would not have been possible. 1 words with the same form. This common development shows that the language in the Midwest should be viewed as a linguistic unit. We discuss how to classify this kind of variety, and coin the term lexicolect. The basis for the paper is first and foremost fieldwork that was done in 2010 by the authors, though we also use some additional material towards the end of the paper.2 Our contention that American Norwegian in the Midwest is a single language variety is in many ways surprising. There are 800 kilometres between the two extreme points (Westby, WI, and Hatton, ND) from which the data for this paper are taken. Also, this is an area to which people immigrated from all over Norway; Haugen (1953:343) describes, for example, how in western Wisconsin ”we find practically all the major dialects of Norway”. We will present our findings in light of the work of Haugen (1953) and Hjelde (1992). We disagree with Haugen (1953), who claimed that a common dialect was developed in the direction of the written norm of "Dano-Norwegian" (see Section 1.2, and Johannessen and Laake, 2015). Certainly, the new vocabulary amongst the American Norwegians does not go in such a direction. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 gives a background introduction to the informants investigated in the paper. Section 3 presents some typical types of language varieties. Section 4 presents two specific syntactic phenomena that show that the language is structurally unchanged. In Section 5 three types of vocabulary change serve as an argument that the American Midwest Norwegian is a new and single language variety. In Section 6 the data are supplemented with more data, and discussed with respect to the language types presented earlier, resulting in the suggestion that the language should be regarded as a lexicolect rather than as a dialect or a koiné, and that there might have been a bidialectal, almost diglossic language situation at the time when Norwegian was one of the major languages in many communities in the Midwest. Section 7 concludes the paper. 2. Informants The fieldwork on which this article is primarily based, took place in March 2010. To obtain informants we placed advertisements in three Norwegian American periodicals: The Viking Magazine, The Norwegian American Weekly and The Norseman. Through these, we wanted to get in contact with descendants of Norwegian immigrants to America. The immigration should have taken place before 1920, and the descendants should speak Norwegian as a result of having learned it at home in the family. We contacted the informants who answered our ads, and our fieldwork itinerary spanned twelve days covering 3518 kilometres and 31 informant visits. The tour included large parts of the Midwest: nine locations in five states (Chicago, IL, Westby, WI, Sunburg, MN, Starbuck, MN, Albert Lea, MN, Stillwater, MN, Webster, SD, Hatton, ND and Grand Forks, ND). 2 The fieldwork was part of the project Norwegian American Dialect Syntax (NorAmDiaSyn), financed by the Norwegian Research Council, as a special subproject under the big dialect project Norwegian Dialect Syntax. Johannessen has done more fieldwork later, but that plays only a minor role in the present paper. 2 All our informants were descendants of Norwegian immigrants, and they varied between second and fifth generation immigrants. The Norwegian language spoken in the Midwest is a dying language, and our informants are aged 67-90 years. We did about an hour of video recording with each informant, typically a twenty-minute interview with one of us in addition to a forty-minute conversation between two informants. Most had never visited Norway and had never spoken Norwegian with someone so much younger than themselves. Our conversations for the most part went completely fluently in Norwegian once we fieldworkers learned to substitute our Oslo dialect with question words and inflections from the dialects of the valleys in eastern Norway. For the present paper we have chosen to investigate five informants from Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota, covering a distance of 800 km, see Table 1. They have been chosen because they speak fluent Norwegian, and because they live far apart; together they cover a large area of the Midwest. Their ancestors come from the same area in Norway (eastern valley districts). For the present study this is irrelevant, since what we are investigating is vocabulary that has clearly developed after the ancestors settled in America. In addition to these key informants, we have also used other informants from other fieldwork to substantiate our claims. Archie (A) Florence (F) Howard (H) Eunice (E) Olaf (O) Westby (WI) Westby (WI) Westby (WI) Sunburg (MN) Hatton (ND) 79 years old 87 years old 82 years old 84 years old 83 years old Grandparents: Grandparents: Great Grandparents: Grandparents: Gudbrands- Gudbrands- grandparents: Gudbrands- Hallingdal and dalen dalen Gausdal dalen Telemark (Hødalen) (Tretten+ Ringebu) One two-week Never been to Never been to Never been to One one-week visit to Norway Norway Norway visit to Norway Norway Has had some Has not had Has had some Has had some Has not had contact with much contact contact with visits from much contact Norwegians. with Norwegians Norway in the with Can read Norwegians and reads 1970s Norwegians Norwegian Norwegian Table 1: Main informants in this paper Each informant will be represented by the first letter of his or her name at the end of each example line. Since the examples are taken from spontaneous speech in conversations of varying length and on different topics, not all phenomena occur in the recordings. It does not follow, of course, that if a phenomenon is not documented for each informant, it does not exist in their language. 3. Heritage language dialect and koiné 3 In this section we will give some background on the concepts of heritage language and koiné language. Both are relevant to understanding the status of the Norwegian language in America, both generally and specifically with respect to the main claim of this paper; that of Norwegian being one variety in spite of linguistic differences among the speakers. The Norwegian language spoken in North America is a heritage language. There are several definitions of this term for example, by Fishman (2001), Valdés (2000), Polinsky and Kagan (2007), Rothman (2009), and Benmamoun, Montrul and Polinsky (2013.) Rothman’s definition (2009:159) covers our kind of heritage speakers, who can have many generations of heritage speakers before themselves: “A language qualifies as a heritage language if it is a language spoken at home or otherwise readily available to young children, and crucially this language is not a dominant language of the larger (national) society.” Recently, the study of immigrant heritage languages in America has become a major research area, as witnessed, for example, in two volumes that have both appeared this year: Page and Putnam (2015) and Johannessen and Salmons (2015). It should be noted that a heritage language does not have to be an immigrant language, though Norwegian definitely is also a language that has immigrated to North America from Europe. Studying heritage languages often involves looking at phenomena that are due to language contact with the majority language.

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