Project and funding

The work on Norwegian in America (the name of the umbrella project) has been going on since 2010 and has taken place within the framework of several projects with different funding.

Norwegian across the Americas (2020 — 2024)
LIA (2014 — 2019)
NorAmDiaSyn (2010 — 2013)
CANS
NorAmDiaSyn og CANS: People

Norwegian across the Americas
This research project, situated at the University of Bergen, investigates the Norwegian language as spoken across the Americas – and how it has developed over generations.

The project will collect new data by interviewing speakers of Norwegian heritage in Latin America. These data will be transcribed, tagged and added to Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS). Old recordings made in North America in the 1930s and 1940s will also be transcribed, tagged and systematically analysed. The new Haugen transcriptions in CANS v.3.1 are financed by this project.
Read more.

LIA (Language Infrastructure made Accessible)
LIA was a five-year national collaboration project between four universities (University of Oslo, University of Bergen, University of Tromsø and The Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Norsk ordbok 2014 and Språkbanken at the National Library, in addition to international partners.

The main aim of the LIA project was to save old speech recordings with Norwegian and Sami language, transcribe and annotate them and put them into databases so that they can be revitalized as research material. The recordings of Norwegian heritage language in America are an important part of LIA.
Read more about the LIA project

NorAmDiaSyn (Norwegian American Dialect syntax)
The NorAmDiaSyn project was an extension of the NorDiaSyn project (Nordic Dialect Syntax).

The project was funded mainly by the Norwegian Research Council and partly by the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. The funding has been used for fieldwork in the United States and workshops in USA and Norway (the WILA-series).

Main goals of NorAmDiaSyn:

Study American Norwegian syntax
Investigate various aspects of the American Norwegian heritage language
Use American Norwegian as data for theoretical, linguistic issues
Study Norwegian American as a contact language and compare with similar contact languages
Study American Norwegian heritage language with other types of heritage languages, language acquisition, language attrition and language change
Make recordings of Norwegian Americans, transcribe the recordings, tag them and build a speech corpus
Make public previous recordings of American Norwegian speech, collected through the 1900s by Didrik Arup Seip, W. Ernst Selmer, Einar Haugen and Arnstein Hjelde
Transcribe and tag old recordings and include them in the corpus
Organize seminars and workshops

CANS - Corpus of American Nordic Speech
Building CANS (Originally Corpus of American Norwegian Speech, now Corpus of American Nordic Speech) started within the NorAmDiaSyn project. The work was funded with support from the University of Tromsø (through Merete Anderssen and Marit Westergaard) and the Text Laboratory. Further development has been financed by the LIA project.
In 2019 Kari Kinn and Ida Larsson got funding for transcription of older recordings (Seip and Selmer and Haugen) from the Research Committee, ILN.

Swedish: The field work was funded by Torsten Söderbergs stiftelse in 2010 and 2011. Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, UiO has financed the transcription work.

NorAmDiaSyn og CANS: People
Janne Bondi Johannessen (UiO) was the project leader together with Joseph Salmons (University of Wisconsin – Madison) and Mike Putnam (Penn State University) as the closest collaborators in USA. Swedish and Icelandic were represented by Ida Larsson (UiO), Maia Andréasson (GU), Benjamin Lyngfelt (GU), Jenny Nilsson (ILF), Sofia Tingsell (GU), Gunvor Flodell (U Umeå) and Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir (U Iceland). In Norway Arnstein Hjelde (HiØ) was the closest collaborator together with research assistant Signe Laake (UiO).

Several people have been involved in fieldwork and workshops: 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). Henrietta Adamsson Eryd (GU), Maia Andréasson (GU), Ida Larsson (UiO) and Sofia Tingsell (GU) have participated in the Swedish field work.

In addition, these employees at the Text Laboratory, UiO have been working with CANS: Maria Evjen, Kristin Hagen, Live Håberg, Andre Kåsen, Alexander Lykke, Eirik Olsen, Joel Priestley, Linn Iren Sjånes Rødvand, Ingvild Røsok, Eirik Tengesdal and Anna Ødegården.

Daniel Zakarias von Gertten has worked with the Swedish transcriptions. Henrietta Adamsson Eryd (GU), Maia Andréasson (GU), Ida Larsson (UiO) and Sofia Tingsell (GU) have later proofread the Swedish material.

Participants at the Second Workshop on Immigrant Languages in America at Fefor, autumn 2011.