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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. 97–116

Heritage Language Obstruent Phonetics and Phonology

American Norwegian and Norwegian-American English

| University of Wisconsin–Madison
ORCID logo | University of Wisconsin–Madison

This chapter explores the acoustics and phonology of speech sounds produced by Norwegian heritage speakers in the Upper Midwest in Norwegian and to a lesser extent in English. The study reports work on acoustic differences in obstruents spoken by heritage speakers whose L1 and L2 are both ‘aspiration’ languages, namely Norwegian and American English, but which differ phonologically in other ways. Our focus falls in particular on laryngeal features, that is, the realization of the distinction between ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ or ‘lenis’ and ‘fortis’ consonants, along with the closely related issue of durational contrasts in Norwegian. Building on Allen and Salmons (2012), we argue that the Norwegian and English spoken by Norwegian-American bilinguals will each show influence from the other language, but asymmetrically.

Keywords: aspiration, duration, laryngeal phonetics, laryngeal phonology, passive voicing, sonorant devoicing
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 [email protected].

Published online: 20 August 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.04all
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[no author supplied]
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