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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. 72–93

Reexamining Icelandic as a Heritage Language in North America

This chapter presents a general description of North American Icelandic (NA Icelandic), a heritage language spoken by a few hundred speakers in language conclaves in the Northern Plains of the United States and Canada. The description is mainly based on studies of the development of Icelandic as a heritage language in intense contact with English in North America (Arnbjörnsdóttir 2006). Generalizations about features of the NA Icelandic lexicon, morpho-syntax and phonology are presented in an effort to lay the groundwork for the next stage of NA Icelandic heritage linguistics. Finally, a possible future research agenda for NA Icelandic is outlined that is in line with the recent discussion about the importance of heritage languages for our understanding of the acquisition and loss of language (Benmamoun et al. 2010).
Keywords: general description, heritage languages, language acquisition, language attrition, language contact, multilingualism, North American Icelandic
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 rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 20 August 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.03arn
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Dehé, Nicole
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Dehé, Nicole & Tanja Kupisch
2022. Prepositional phrases and case in North American (heritage) Icelandic. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 45:3 ► pp. 254 ff. DOI logo
Johannessen, Janne Bondi
2018. Factors of variation, maintenance and change in Scandinavian heritage languages. International Journal of Bilingualism 22:4 ► pp. 447 ff. DOI logo
Johannessen, Janne Bondi & Joseph Salmons
2021. Germanic Heritage Varieties in the Americas. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 252 ff. DOI logo
Kasstan, Jonathan R, Anita Auer & Joseph Salmons
2018. Heritage-language speakers: Theoretical and empirical challenges on sociolinguistic attitudes and prestige. International Journal of Bilingualism 22:4 ► pp. 387 ff. DOI logo
Putnam, Michael T., Lara Schwarz & Andrew D. Hoffman
2021. Morphology of Heritage Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 613 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Heritage Languages around the World. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 11 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Grammatical Aspects of Heritage Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 579 ff. DOI logo

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