Projects
North American Norwegian Tonal Accents in Contact (NANTiC)
2025–2029 Funded by the Research Council of Norway (no. 354301)
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Between the 1820s and 1930s over 850,000 Norwegians immigrated to the United States. Many of them established and settled in Norwegian-speaking communities, especially in the American Upper Midwest. As a result, Norwegian has been spoken as a home language, or heritage language, in these communities for over a century. Due to widespread changes in American society in the 20th century, present-day American Norwegian speakers are among the last generation of individuals to have acquired the language as children and to have used it at home and throughout their communities. The history of intense language contact has nonetheless shaped the local, American varieties of Norwegian. This project, North American Norwegian Tonal Accents in Contact, examines the impact of bilingualism on the American Norwegian sound system, with an eye to the role that tonal accents play in the heritage language grammar and whether it has changed among the American diaspora of Norwegian speakers.
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Link to project page (under development)
Språkleg mangfald i Sørvest-Noreg
Linguistic diversity in southwestern Norway
This project investigates the linguistic diversity of southwestern Norway, encompassing the counties of Rogaland and Agder, as well as neighboring areas in Hordaland, Vestfold and Telemark. The primary focus is on language change induced by language and dialect contact in various sociolinguistic contexts.
American Norwegian Sound Systems in Contact
Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Fellowship (no. 838164), Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan, University of Oslo. 2019–2021.
This project investigated variation and change in Norwegian and English sound patterns as the result of generations of bilingualism in Norwegian-American immigrant communities. This work integrated perspectives in heritage language linguistics, sociolinguistics, and formal phonology by examining the interactions between linguistic and social pathways for contact-induced language change. Primary results show the maintenance of the core Norwegian phonological system that constrains English-influenced phonetic variation.
Westby, WI. Photo by Joseph Salmons.
Contrast, variation, and change in Norwegian vowel systems
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This project was partially funded by the American Scandinavian Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. 2015–2018.
My dissertation research focused on the relationship between phonological representations and sociophonetic variation in Norwegian vowels. Based on fieldwork conducted in four cities in Norway – Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, and Stavanger – in 2016, speakers were strikingly consistent in which acoustic characteristics of vowels were stable, and which were variable, regionally and socially. Results support the view that formal representations that minimally encode phonological contrast restricts the range of potential surface-level variation. The findings furthermore are consistent with a common, abstract Norwegian vowel system across dialects.