Germanic heritage languages in North America
Subtitle: acquisition, attrition and change
By: Edited by Janne Bondi Johannessen, University of Oslo ; Joseph C. Salmons, University of Wisconsin
Series: Studies in language variation -- volume 18
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company; Benjamins Publishing Company, John
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9789027234988; 9789027268198
Subjects: Language acquisition; Germanic languages; Influence on Germanic; Influence on English; English language; Congresses; Languages in contact; Bilingualism; History
Description: 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 language 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 --
Notes: "This volume grows from recent collaboration among a group of scholars working on Germanic immigrant languages spoken in North America, initially faculty and students working on German dialects and Norwegian, and steadily expanding since to cover the family more broadly. More structured cooperation began with a small workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison four years ago and continued with larger workshops sponsored in turn by the University of Oslo, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Iceland. The volume you're reading is the first group publication in English (though see Johannessen and Salmons 2012 for a collection of papers on and written in Norwegian), and several others are in preparation. Most of the papers included in this volume have grown from the ongoing set of international workshops just sketched. These were started by the co-editors, led initially by the first co-editor, a trajectory reflected in the relatively heavy representation of work on Norwegian. A number of the chapters have been developed specifically from these networks and ongoing dialogues about heritage languages" -- Introduction

Includes bibliographical references and index.