none 10.1075/silv.18.09ann John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 77305847 1967347 1421067 202507030919000000 10.1075 2025-07-03T03:18:48Z 2015-08-20T09:28:49Z 13 1872-9592 10.1075/silv https://benjamins.com/ catalog/silv Janne Bondi Johannessen University of Oslo https://ror.org/01xtthb56 Joseph C. Salmons University of Wisconsin https://ror.org/031q21x57 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3491-0443 Acquisition, attrition and change 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. 18 8 20 2015 8 20 2015 9789027234988 9789027268198 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/silv.18 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027268198 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/silv.18/html https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027268198.pdf Lucas Annear University of Wisconsin-Madison https://ror.org/01y2jtd41 Kristin Speth University of Wisconsin-Madison https://ror.org/01y2jtd41 Lexical Change in American Norwegian 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. 8 20 2015 8 20 2015 201 216 10.1075/silv.18.09ann https://benjamins.com/catalog/silv.18.09ann https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/silv.18.09ann/html Journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association Beniak 6–7 73 1984 “Sociolinguistic Evidence of a Possible Case of Syntactic Convergence in Ontarian French.” 10.1017/CBO9780511606526 The Norwegian Language in America: A Study in Bilingual Behavior Haugen 2 1953 Bilingualism in the Americas: A Bibliography and Research Guide Haugen 1956 Trøndsk talemål i Amerika Hjelde 1992 Corpus of American Norwegian Speech Johannessen 2010 Norsk lingvistisk tidsskrift Johannessen 30 2 365 2012 “Østnorsk som norsk fellesdialekt i Midtvesten.” Journal of Language Contact Johannessen “Eastern Norwegian as a Common Norwegian Dialect in the American Midwest.” Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009 Johannessen 73 2009 “The Nordic Dialect Corpus – An Advanced Research Tool.” 10.1017/CBO9780511809873 10.1086/465959 Bilingualism Romaine 2 1995 10.1177/1367006909339814 Handbook of Sociolinguistics Sankoff 638 2001 “Linguistic Outcomes of Language Contact.”