In this article I investigate dialect variation in the old Norwegian settlement around Coon Valley and Westby in Vernon County, Wisconsin, with a focus on how the Norwegian dialects spoken here have changed over time. The language in this community is well documented; the oldest recordings are from 1931, the most recent ones were done in 2014. By comparing such recordings from different times, I point to some tendencies of how different Norwegian speech varieties have changed in the settlement towards the formation of a koiné.
Åfarli, Tor A. This volume. “Hybrid Verb Forms in American Norwegian and the Analysis of the Syntactic Relation Between the Verb and its Tense.”
Allen, Brent and Joseph Salmons. This volume. “Heritage Language Obstruent Phonetics and Phonology: American Norwegian and Norwegian-American English.”
Annear, Lucas and Kristin Speth. This volume. “Maintaining a Multilingual Repertoire: Lexical Change in American Norwegian.”
Flaten, Nils. 1900–04. “Notes on the American-Norwegian with Vocabulary. Dialect Notes 2: 115–126.
Flom, George. T. 1900–04. “English Elements in Norse Dialects of Utica, Wisconsin.”Dialect Notes 2: 257–268.
Flom, George T. 1903. “The Gender of Norse Loan-Nouns in Norse Dialects in America.”The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 5: 1–31.
Flom, George T. 1912. “Det norske sprogs bruk og utvikling i Amerika.”Nordmands- Forbundet 4: 233–250.
Flom, George T. 1926. “English Loanwords in American Norwegian. As spoken in the Koshkonong Settlement, Wisconsin.”American Speech 1: 541–558.
Flom, George T. 1929. “On the Phonology of English Loanwords in the Norwegian Dialects of Koshkonong in Wisconsin.”Arkiv for Nordisk Filologi – Tilläggsband til bd. XL: 178–189.
Flom, George T. 1931. “Um det norske målet i Amerika.”Norsk aarbok: 113–124.
Golden, Anne and Elizabeth Lanza. This volume. “Coon Valley Norwegians Meet Norwegians from Norway: Language, Culture and Identity Among Heritage Language Speakers in the U.S.”
Haugen, Einar. 1956. Bilingualism in the Americas: A Bibliography and Research Guide. (Publications of the American Dialect Society 26). Tuscaloosa, AL: University Alabama Press.
Haugen, Einar. (1953) 1969. The Norwegian Language in America. Bloomington / London: Indiana University Press.
Hjelde, Arnstein. 1992. Trøndsk talemål i Amerika. Trondheim: Tapir.
Hjelde, Arnstein. 1996a. “The Gender of English Nouns Used in American Norwegian.” In Language Contact Across the North Atlantic, ed. by P. Sture Ureland and Iain Clarkson, 297–312. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Hjelde, Arnstein. 1996b. “Some Phonological Changes in a Norwegian Dialect in America.” In Language Contact Across the North Atlantic, ed. by P. Sture Ureland and Iain Clarkson, 283–295. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Holand, Hjalmar R. 1927. Coon Prairie: en historisk beretning om den Norske evangeliske lutherske menighet paa Coon Prairie. Skrevet i anledning av dens 75-aarsfest i 1927. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House.
Holand, Hjalmar R. 1928. Coon Valley: en historisk beretning om de norske menigheter i Coon Valley, skrevet i anledning av kaldets 75-aarsfest i 1928. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House.
Hjelde, Arnstein. 2012. “”Folkan mine, dæm bære snakka norsk” – norsk i Wisconsin frå 1940-talet og fram til i dag.”Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 30(2): 183–203.
Ibarra, Robert A. 1976. Ethnicity Genuine and Spurious – A Study of a Norwegian Community in Rural Wisconsin. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin-Madison dissertation.
Johannessen, Janne Bondi. This volume. “Attrition in an American Norwegian Heritage Language Speaker.”
Johannessen, Janne Bondi and Signe Laake. 2012. “To myter om det norske språket i Amerika: Er det gammeldags? Nærmer det seg en bokmålsstandard?”Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 30(2): 204–228.
Johannessen, Janne Bondi and Signe Laake. This volume. “On Two Myths of the Norwegian Language in America: Is it Old-Fashioned? Is it Approaching the Written Bokmål Standard?”
Kartsamling for leksikografi, [URL] (Accessed February 12, 2011) [A collection of detailed dialect maps from Norway.]
Kerswill, Paul. 2002. “Koineization and Accommodation.” In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. by J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes, 669–702. Blackwell: Oxford.
Kerswill, Paul and Peter Trudgill. 2005. “The Birth of New Dialects.” In Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages, ed. by Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens and Paul Kerswill, 196–220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Larsson, Ida, Sofia Tingsell and Maia Andréasson. This Volume. “Variation and Change in American Swedish.”
Munch, Peter A. 1949. “Social Adjustment Among Wisconsin Norwegians.”American Sociological Review 14(6): 780–787.
Munch, Peter A. 1954. “Segregation and Assimilation of Norwegian Settlements in Wisconsin.”Norwegian-American Studies and Records 18: 102–140.
Oftedal, Magne. 1949a. “Norsk talemål i Amerika.”Syn og segn 55: 195–203.
Oftedal, Magne. 1949b. “The Vowel System of a Norwegian Dialect in Wisconsin.”Language 25: 261–267.
Qualey, Carlton Chester. 1938. Norwegian Settlement in the United States. Northfield: NAHA.
Seifert, Lester W.J. 1993. “The Development and Survival of the German Language in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In The German Language in American, 1683–1991, ed. by Joseph C. Salmons, 322–337. Madison: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies.
Synopsisen, [URL] (Accessed February 12, 2011) [A collection of detailed information on pronunciation and morphology from each Norwegian county (kommune).]
Trudgill, Peter J., Elizabeth Gordon, Gillian Lewis and Margaret Maclagan. 2000. “Determinism in New-Dialect Formation and the Genesis of New Zealand English.”Journal of Linguistics 36: 299–318.
US Census Bureau. 2000. US Census, Special Tabulation 224.
Westergaard, Marit and Merete Anderssen. This volume. “Word Order Variation in Norwegian Possessive Constructions: Bilingual Acquisition and Attrition.”
Cited by (14)
Cited by 14 other publications
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2021. Split possession and definiteness marking in American Norwegian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 44:2 ► pp. 182 ff.
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2020. Heritage Germanic Languages in North America. In The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics, ► pp. 783 ff.
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2021. Heritage Languages around the World. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 11 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.