Germanic Heritage Languages in North America

Germanic Heritage Languages in North America
Author :
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages : 426
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789027268198
ISBN-13 : 9027268193
Rating : 4/5 (193 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Germanic Heritage Languages in North America by : Janne Bondi Johannessen

Download or read book Germanic Heritage Languages in North America written by Janne Bondi Johannessen and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents new empirical findings about Germanic heritage varieties spoken in North America: Dutch, German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, West Frisian and Yiddish, and varieties of English spoken both by heritage speakers and in communities after language shift. The volume focuses on three critical issues underlying the notion of ‘heritage language’: acquisition, attrition and change. The book offers theoretically-informed discussions of heritage language processes across phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics and the lexicon, in addition to work on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and contact settings. With this, the volume also includes a variety of frameworks and approaches, synchronic and diachronic. Most European Germanic languages share some central linguistic features, such as V2, gender and agreement in the nominal system, and verb inflection. As minority languages faced with a majority language like English, similarities and differences emerge in patterns of variation and change in these heritage languages. These empirical findings shed new light on mechanisms and processes.


Germanic Heritage Languages in North America Related Books