Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
Most speakers of Norwegian in the Middle West belong to the farming class. Nearly all are bilingual, and many of them handle the English language better than the Norwegian. It is often easy to detect their Scandinavian background in listening to their English, even in the case of second- or third-generation Americans. They were usually educated in a grade school and a Norwegian-Lutheran parochial school. The parochial school, until relatively recent times, was conducted in Norwegian; the children were taught to read and write the language. As a result, only the youngest speakers of Norwegian are without any knowledge of its literary form. Literary Dano-Norwegian is still used in church services, and is the familiar form of the language to those of the city population who cultivate the idiom of their ancestors in the Sons of Norway lodges; but the country communities use dialects almost exclusively. As a rule, a community has only one main dialect. The pioneers preferred to settle with people from their own district in Norway; if people from two districts settled close together, the dialect that counted the larger number of speakers usually replaced the other. Dialect mixtures is seldom to be found except in individual speakers; only one case has been reported where a mixed dialect seems to be the language of a community. Only the largest settlements, for instance the Koshkonong settlement near Madison, have maintained several dialects with equal prestige.
1 The material for this paper is taken from records of American Norwegian speech that I made in Wisconsin during the fall of 1947 and the spring of 1948. My work was made possible by a grant from the Committee on Studies in American Civilization at the University of Wisconsin, and is a direct continuation of the extensive research conducted for a number of years by Professor Einar Haugen.
2 Symbols for English phonemes are placed between periods, to distinguish them from Lyster phoneme symbols. Mondovi is regarded as having both English and Lyster phonemes. The abbreviation E stands for the north-central variety of American English spoken in Wisconsin.
3 The introduction of the /d/ may be partly due to the phenomenon known as ‘opposition entre voisins’. A great number of Norwegian dialects have /-nn/ where Lyster has /-nd/: /brann/: Lyster /brand/ ‘fire’, /hunn/: Lyster /hund/ ‘dog’, /vonn/: Lyster /vondə/ ‘bad, evil’.
4 Cf. Fries and Pike, Coexistent phonemic systems, Lg. 25.29–50. [But if the forms with ‘English’ phonemes are actually part of the Norwegian language used by immigrant speakers, why should they be distinguished from other words in making a phonemic analysis?—BB]