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Intonation Patterns in American Norwegian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Einar Haugen
Einar Haugen*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Abstract

[American English loan words in the dialect of Norwegian immigrants are provided with one of the two intonation patterns which characterize native words. This paper investigates the distribution of the two patterns in such loan words and formulates the rules of their occurrence.]

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 17 , Issue 1-Part1: January-March , March 1941, pp. 40 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © 1941 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 There is an extensive literature on the subject, most of which is listed in N. C. Stalling, Das Phonologische System des Schwedischen I (Nymegen, 1935). Two basic monographs are those of Johan Storm (Om Tonefaldet i de skandinaviske Sprog, Oslo, 1874) and Axel Kock (Die alt- und neuschwedische Accentuirung; Quellen und Forschungen 87, Strassburg, 1901).

2 Cf. Peter Groth (the first scholarly commentator on American Norwegian) in 1897: ‘Persons who have been in America a long time . . . acquire a foreign quality in their voices, so that no matter how fluently they speak their native language, one can still hear that it has become a foreign tongue to them.‘

3 See discussion of his background and linguistic type in Language 14.112–3 (1938).

4 The distribution of intonation in the native Sol0r dialect has been analyzed in Dr. Amund Larsen's exhaustive monograph on the phonology of that dialect: Lydlæren i den solørske Dialekt, Oslo, 1894.

5 Intonation 1 is here marked by a single accent mark before the stressed syllable, 2 by a double accent mark. The symbol [ṛ] denotes Midwestern American r and the Norwegian ‘thick’ l, which in this dialect appear to be identical.

6 Lydlæren 45.

7 Cf. Ivar Aimes, Norsk Uttale-Ordbok 33 (Oslo, 1925).

8 Cf. Larsen 42–6.

9 Cf. Larsen 41 bottom.

10 Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskab 9.261 (1938).