Heritage Swedish, English, and Textual Space in Rural Communities of Practice

Angela Hoffman & Merja Kytö, University of Uppsala

We know that English has replaced Swedish in most domains in the Swedish heritage communities in the U.S. Yet no matter where linguists have looked in Swedish-American communities, they have seen that language shift was never abrupt but rather a dynamic, protracted process (Hasselmo 1974; Hedblom 1983; Hoffman Karstadt 2003; cf. Haugen 1953 [1969]) involving the co-existence of multiple linguistic systems, among them Standard Swedish, dialects of Swedish, English, and hybridized intermediary forms that are akin to language intertwining (cf. Rickford 1987; Bakker & Muysken1995; Valdés 2001). In other words, linguists see evidence for the presence of a bilingual continuum that has been available to varying degrees for speakers and writers in Swedish-American communities.

From previous research on language shift as observed in the genre of cookbooks (Hoffman & Kytö forthcoming 2017), we know that communities make proportionately different uses of features drawn from points along the continuum. In cookbooks, we have accounted for the different language patterning visible from one community to another within the framework enregisterment (Remlinger 2009; Johnstone 2016). Our current investigation aims to identify stages of transition (cf. Schneider 2003; 2007) in language shift as perceptible in another type of written records.

The data under investigation range from the mid-1800s to the early 2000s. We investigate rural, Midwestern communities founded by Swedish pioneers, namely four places where the Swedish-American Lutheran church gained an early foothold (Blanck 1997). Further, we use to our analytical advantage the comparability of not only the settlement histories of the towns but also the similar types of texts that were produced in their Lutheran congregations. We examine historical records from the following places: Andover and Sandwich, Illinois; and Lindsborg and Marquette, Kansas. In particular, we access parallel sets of written genres: church records ranging across many decades, i.e., meeting minutes, ministerial acts, and lists of members, and numerous community cookbooks compiled and printed by women in some of the communities of practice (Wenger 1998; Morgan 2014) affiliated with the same Lutheran congregations.

In this paper, we pursue a number of questions pertaining to language transition and language shift: (1) What factors have been at work to promote or (at times) slow down the language shift from Swedish into English? More precisely, what roles have been played by genres, localities, and communities of practice? (2) In the texts under investigation, what evidence reveals that Heritage Swedish and English continue to inhabit different textual spaces? (3) And finally, to what extent is there evidence, if any, to suggest that one so-far under-explored factor in Swedish-American communities, namely gender, has played a role in the dynamic processes of language shift?

Selected secondary references

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