NorAmDiaSyn - Norwegian in America

The NorAmDiaSyn project is an extension of the NorDiaSyn project. In NorAmDiaSyn we will also work on dialect syntax, partly along the lines of NorDiaSyn. The collected speech material will of course be suitable for other types of studies, both linguistic and historical.

Financing

The project has been funded mainly by the Norwegian Research Council and partly by the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. Funding has gone to field trips in the U.S. and three workshops in the United States and Norway.

The Corpus of American Norwegian Speech has been funded by the Norwegian Research Council, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Tromsø (through Merete Anderssen and Marit Westergaard) and the Text Laboratory,

People

Janne Bondi Johannessen (University of Oslo) is the project leader with Joseph Salmons (University of Wisconsin - Madison) and Mike Putnam (Penn State University) as the closest collaborators in the United States. We also have Swedish and Icelandic represented with Ida Larsson (GU), Maia Andreasson (GU), Benjamin Heather Field (GU), Jenny Nilsson (ILF), Sofia Things Sell (GU), Gunvor Flodell (U Umeå) and Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir (U Iceland). In Norway, Arnstein Hjelde (OUC) is the closest co-worker together with research assistant Signe Laake (UiO) (mostly in the beginning of the project before she began her doctoral studies). Furthermore, there are many who have been involved in fieldwork and workshops and also have included Norwegian in America as a field of research:

Brent Allen (U Wisconsin), Merete Anderssen (UiT), Lucas Annear (U Wisconsin), Kristin Melum Eide (NTNU), Ruth Fjeld (UiO), Anne Golden (UiO), Lous Janus (U Minnesota), Ingeborg Kongslien (UiO), Elizabeth Lanza (UiO), David Natvig (U Wisconsin), Kristin Speth (U Wisconsin), Beate Taranrød (UiO), Bert Vaux (U Cambridge), Marit Westergaard (UiT), Tor Åfarli (NTNU).

Participants at the Second Workshop on Immigrant Languages in America at Fefor in September 2011. Joseph Salmons and Janne Bondi Johannessen to the right in the first row..

Kristin Hagen (UiO), Eirik Olsen (UiO), Alexander Lykke (UiO), Andre Kåsen and Joel Priestley (UiO) have been working with the American Norwegian speech corpus.

Main goals of NorAmDiaSyn

• Study American Norwegian syntax

• Investigate various aspects of American Norwegian language

• Use American Norwegian as data for linguistic theoretical issues

• Study Norwegian American as a transmission language and compare with similar transmission languages

• Study American Norwegian transmisson language with other types of language contact, language learning, language decline and language change

• Make recordings of Norwegian Americans, both in formal interviews and informal conversations between two informants (much is done, look under the tab Informant recording)

• Transcribe recorded speech phonetically and translate them into orthographic transcription

• Train a speech tagger and tag the American Norwegian transcriptions morphologically

• Build a speech corpus for American Norwegian. A demo version is already ready in the autumn of 2012.

(Search he Corpus of American Norwegian Speech here)

• Provide recordings of American Norwegian speech, collected through the 1900s by Didrik Arup Seip, W. Ernst Selmer, Einar Haugen and Arnstein Hjelde (much has been done, see this page)

• Transcribe and tag the old recordings, and include them in the corpus

• Organize seminars and workshops

Selected literature on the Norwegian language in America:

Haugen, Einar. 1953. The Norwegian Language in America. Philadelphia.

Haugen, Einar. 1992. A language Survey that Failed: Seip and Selmer. The American Dialect Society.

Hjelde, Arnstein. 1992. Trøndsk talemål i Amerika. Tapir forlag.

Hjelde, Arnstein. 1996a. Some phonological changes in a Norwegian dialect in America. In P. Sture Ureland and Iain Clarkson (eds.) Language contact across America. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, p. 284–295.

Hjelde, Arnstein. 1996b. The gender of English nouns used in American Norwegian. In P. Sture Ureland and Iain Clarkson (eds.) Language contact across America. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, p. 297–312.

Johannessen, Janne Bondi og Signe Laake. 2011. Den amerikansk-norske dialekten i Midtvesten. Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi 2011 ;Volum 116. s. 177-186.

Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift Vol 30, Nr 2 (2012): Special issue on Norwegian in America. Guest Editors: Janne Bondi Johannessen and Joseph Salmons.

Taranrød, Beate. 2011. Leddstillingen i relativsetninger i amerikansknorsk. Masteroppgave. Institutt for lingvistiske og nordiske studier, UiO.