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❖ 85 ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ Chapter 6 Long after the Immigrant Language Shift Swedish and Norwegian in Heritage Communities Angela Falk When Swedish and Norwegian emigrants left their home parishes to migrate to the United States, the status of their native languages for them and their families was no longer the same. The language contact they experienced with English as individuals and as groups set into motion a dynamic state of affairs that is still perceptible today in some communities. This chapter compares dimensions of the Swedish and Norwegian language-shift experiences and traces the basic trajectory for the two languages transplanted in the United States. Swedish and Norwegian, once immigrant languages spoken by hundreds of thousands of people across the United States in the 1800s and 1900s, have now also gained the status of so-called heritage languages.1 The Dynamism of Immigrant and Heritage Languages To define the concept heritage language, it is useful to examine its semantics in relation to other terms frequently used for languages other than English (lotes). The terminology for languages in the United States that are not English is numerous. Foreign language as a concept certainly amplifies the difference between English (the dominant language) and all others. In the educational world, the term foreign language brings to mind associations with, for example, courses in Spanish, French, German, and Latin that must be taken to satisfy degree requirements. At first glance minority language seems like a transparent term simply relating to any language that is not English and, by extension, any language spoken by fewer persons than English. Close inspection of U.S. Census figures (selecting results for “language spoken at home”), however, will reveal that minority languages actually are spoken by the “numerical majority” in many communities, including, for example, Hialeah, Florida; Laredo, Texas; East Los Angeles, California; and Brownsville, Texas. The United States and immigrant languages may be thought to go hand in hand, immigrant language here being linked with the (native) languages that are not English and that are spoken by people who seek residency in the United States. Lotes, used by Michael Clyne, has wide applicability thanks to the neutrality of the expression, but the term 86 ❖ Angela Falk does not capture the dimension of identity formation for those who speak or wish to speak the lote. The term heritage language has been given considerable attention over the last decade by linguists and language education activists in the United States. As in the case of some of the terms above, the term heritage language encompasses linguistic as well as social dimensions. Joy Kreeft Peyton and Ann Kelleher defined it as a language “used to describe any of these connections between a non-dominant language and a person, a family, or a community.”2 In focusing on the individual, Peyton wrote that the term heritage language learner “is used to describe a person studying a language who has proficiency in or a cultural connection to that language.” In considering the phenomenon of heritage languages from the vantage point of an individual user, Guadalupe Valdés emphasized that “It is the historical and personal connection to the language that is salient and not the actual proficiency of individual speakers.” Valdés’s perspective is highly relevant in post-immigrant settings. She exemplified her viewpoint by identifying some types of heritage language learners. One type includes persons “raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken , who speak or only understand the heritage language, and who have some proficiency in English and the heritage language.” This definition of heritage language learners is a broad mantle that readily accounts for numerous scenarios . It is worth identifying a range of heritage language proficiencies. One such example of this type of heritage language learner includes young adults—native speakers of English—who are bilingual to a great extent in Spanish thanks to their family life and who now study Spanish in a university classroom with the goal of acquiring greater proficiency in standard written and spoken Spanish. Another way to define heritage language learning is “the study, maintenance, and revitalization of non-English languages in the United States.” The latter general definition does, of course, include learners with a high degree of functional proficiency, as in the case of the Spanish speakers described above, but it can also account for learners who have a high degree of connection, awareness, and self-affiliation to their heritage yet simultaneously relatively little observable proficiency in the heritage language itself. As will...

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