Full Description
This book presents new empirical findings about Germanic heritage varieties spoken in North America: Dutch, German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, West Frisian and Yiddish, and varieties of English spoken both by heritage speakers and in communities after language shift. The volume focuses on three critical issues underlying the notion of 'heritage language': acquisition, attrition and change. The book offers theoretically-informed discussions of heritage language processes across phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics and the lexicon, in addition to work on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and contact settings. With this, the volume also includes a variety of frameworks and approaches, synchronic and diachronic. Most European Germanic languages share some central linguistic features, such as V2, gender and agreement in the nominal system, and verb inflection. As minority languages faced with a majority language like English, similarities and differences emerge in patterns of variation and change in these heritage languages. These empirical findings shed new light on mechanisms and processes.
Contents
1. The study of Germanic heritage languages in the Americas (by Johannessen, Janne Bondi); 2. Part I. Acquisition and attrition; 3. Word Order Variation in Norwegian Possessive Constructions: Bilingual Acquisition and Attrition (by Westergaard, Marit); 4. Attrition in an American Norwegian Heritage Language Speaker (by Johannessen, Janne Bondi); 5. Reexamining Icelandic as a Heritage Language in North America (by Arnbjornsdottir, Birna); 6. Part II. Phonetic and phonological change; 7. Heritage Language Obstruent Phonetics and Phonology: American Norwegian and Norwegian-American English (by Allen, Brent); 8. The History of Front Rounded Vowels in New Braunfels German (by Pierce, Marc); 9. Part III. (Morpho-)syntactic and pragmatic change; 10. Functional Convergence and Extension in Contact: Syntactic and Semantic Attributes of the Progressive Aspect in Pennsylvania Dutch (by Brown, Joshua R.); 11. Hybrid Verb Forms in American Norwegian and the Analysis of the Syntactic Relation between the Verb and its Tense (by Afarli, Tor A.); 12. Discourse Markers in the Narratives of New York Hasidim: More V2 Attrition (by Kahan Newman, Zelda); 13. Part IV. Lexical change; 14. Maintaining a Multilingual Repertoire: Lexical Change in American Norwegian (by Annear, Lucas); 15. How Synagogues Became Shuls: The Boomerang Effect in Yiddish-Influenced English, 1895-2010 (by Benor, Sarah Bunin); 16. Phonological Non-integration of Lexical Borrowings in Wisconsin West Frisian (by Ehresmann, Todd); 17. Borrowing Modal Elements into American Norwegian: The Case of suppose(d) (by Eide, Kristin Melum); 18. Part V. Variation and real-time change; 19. Changes in a Norwegian Dialect in America (by Hjelde, Arnstein); 20. On Two Myths of the Norwegian Language in America: Is it Old-Fashioned? Is it Approaching the Written Bokmal Standard? (by Johannessen, Janne Bondi); 21. Coon Valley Norwegians Meet Norwegians from Norway: Language, Culture and Identity among Heritage Language Speakers in the U. S. (by Golden, Anne); 22. Variation and Change in American Swedish (by Larsson, Ida); 23. On the Decrease of Language Norms in a Disintegrating Language (by Smits, Caroline); 24. Index of languages and dialects; 25. Index of authors; 26. Index of subjects
