Lexical Change in American Norwegian: Maintaining a Multilingual Repertoire

Annear, Lucas; Speth, Kristin

doi:10.1075/silv.18.09ann

In: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. 201–216

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Maintaining a Multilingual Repertoire

Lexical Change in American Norwegian

Lucas Annear | University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kristin Speth | University of Wisconsin-Madison

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

https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.09ann

This paper examines change in the lexicon of American Norwegian by investigating phonemic, semantic and lexical transfer from American English into the heritage Norwegian of the American Midwest. We observe these types of transfer when the semantic structure, phonemic structure, or both, are transferred from English to the heritage variety. Drawing on Matras’ (2009) insight that languages converge as a result of the need to simplify the selection procedure, we expect lexical transfer (involving both semantic and phonemic structure) to be the most abundant of these three phenomena as it provides more convergence (simplification). Our findings support this hypothesis and corroborate those of Haugen (1953), showing that lexical transfer is the most common route of convergence in American Norwegian.

Keywords: American Norwegian, heritage language, lexical transfer, multilingual repertoire, phonemic transfer, semantic transfer

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