Maia Andréasson, Henrietta Adamsson Eryd, Ida Larsson & Sofia Tingsell

Do you speak Swedish? American Swedish in the Corpus of American Nordic Speech

Maia Andréasson, Henrietta Adamsson Eryd, Ida Larsson & Sofia Tingsell, University of Gothenburg (Saturday 10:00-10:30)

This paper describes the American Swedish contribution to the Corpus of American Nordic speech (CANS) and illustrates the usefulness of this (sub-)corpus by investigating a number of linguistic phenomena (vocabulary, gender, word order) studied in other Heritage Scandinavian sources.

Hitherto, CANS has included transcriptions, sound, and video of (currently) 50 Norwegian heritage language (HL) speakers in North America (see Johannessen 2015). To this corpus has now been added recordings of 17 speakers of American Swedish recorded in 2011–2014 in in Minnesota, Illinois, and Texas. Like the Norwegian recordings, the Swedish data has been manually transcribed in a phonetic way, manually with additional orthographic transcription using the Oslo semi-automatic transliterator and links to the original audio files. The recordings include a semi-structured interview (typically about the speakers’ general and linguistic background and Swedish heritage). Many speakers (depending on proficiency etc.) also tell a short story on the basis of a cartoon strip, a task designed to elicit comparable data for all informants. Furthermore, some informants are recorded when discussing with each other, without the participation of an interviewer. Metadata provides information about genre, the informants’ place of birth, relation to Sweden in terms of geographic area and generations since emigration, as well as information about language acquisition and use of English and Swedish.

In order to find informants, we used the question Do you speak Swedish? to generate contacts with all kinds of Swedish speakers. Like the American Norwegian speakers in the corpus, most of the Swedish speakers are heritage speakers, i.e. they acquired Swedish as children, in a naturalistic setting at home and without formal training, but in the American context, where English is the dominant language (cf. e.g. Valdés 2000). All speakers had English as their strongest languages at the time of recording. Most of these speakers were 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants, and over 70 years old at the time. The ancestors of these speakers were among the 1.3 million Swedes that emigrated during the period from around 1850 to 1920, and CANS therefore documents the last remnants of the American Swedish described by Hasselmo (1974) and recorded by Hedblom & Ordéus around 50 years ago. Since the older recordings are still available through the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore, CANS makes it possible to study linguistic change in real time (cf. Larsson et al. 2015). Unlike the American Norwegian recordings, the Swedish contribution to CANS includes speakers that are descendants of more recent immigrants; a few are children whose parents emigrated around the turn of the 20th century. Like the other heritage speakers, these acquired Swedish in the American context, but unlike the older speakers they are not part of the rural American Swedish settlements, and they have not gone many years (decades) without using their Swedish, like many of the old speakers. By comparing the new heritage speakers with the old, we can disentangle some of the factors that can affect variation and change in American Swedish. In the young speakers, some of the typical older American Swedish vocabulary is missing and we see no effects of koineization. On the other hand, the finite verb sometimes precedes negations in embedded clauses (cf. Larsson & Johannessen 2015) and, in the nominal domain, common gender is sometimes generalized (cf. Johannessen & Larsson 2015, Lohndal & Westergaard 2016); this appears to be general features of Swedish in a heritage linguistic context, rather than features of e.g. an American Swedish koiné. Also unlike the American Norwegian data, the Swedish contribution includes a couple of emigrant Swedish speakers, i.e. speakers that emigrated from Sweden themselves. Unlike the heritage speakers, these speakers acquired Swedish in a context where Swedish was also the dominant language (in Sweden). This makes it possible to investigate to what extent the properties of Heritage Swedish are due to the acquisitional context, or to other factors that relate to bilingualism and contact with English; we can to a larger extent control for variation in the input for the emigrant speakers. In Emigrant Swedish, we do not find the change in embedded word order that is typical of the heritage language, but we do see some generalization of the common gender in the nominal domain. Emigrant speakers were included also in the recordings by Hedblom & Ordéus, so again, CANS offers a possibility of studies of linguistic change in real time.

References

  • Hasselmo, Nils. 1974. Amerikasvenska.
  • Johannessen, J.B. 2015. The Corpus of American Norwegian Speech (CANS).
  • Larsson, I., S. Tingsell & M. Andréasson. 2015. Variation and Change in American Swedish.
  • Larsson, I. & J.B. Johannessen 2015. Incomplete Acquisition and Verb Placement in Heritage Scandinavian;
  • Valdés, Guadalupe. 2000. The teaching of heritage languages: an introduction for Slavic-teaching professionals.

URLs

  • CANS: http://tekstlab.uio.no/norskiamerika/english/corpus.html
  • The Oslo Transliterator: http://www.hf.uio.no/iln/english/about/organization/text-laboratory/services/oslo-transliterator/