Volume 5, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Historical heritage language ego-documents: From home, from away, and from below, Edited by Joshua Brown

Recent research into heritage languages has shown the results of language contact structurally and socially. This work is almost exclusively synchronic. This special issue presents five papers that look at the historical record of language contact in migration contexts. In using ego-documents written by everyday users of the languages in contact, we uncover the usefulness of incorporating historical sociolinguistic analysis into heritage language research.

For eighteenth and nineteenth century Pennsylvania Dutch speakers, a variety of German was the language of their books, their newspapers, and their schools. Being far from the European homeland created a hegemonic shift in the linguistic lives of these early German Americans; they were adopting an American regional identity. Along with their shift in identities and in linguistic hegemony, structural aspects of the languages they used also changed: their written German was in contact with English and with their spoken Pennsylvania Dutch. In addition, the limitations of formal education in German at rural schools meant that the emphasis among most Pennsylvania Dutch was on the receptive knowledge of German and not on productive control of the language. In time, a variety of German called Pennsylvania High German emerged in the publications, writings, and schools of Pennsylvania. This article shares recent findings of a large corpus of written attempts at Pennsylvania High German by Civil War soldiers. It discusses both the structural aspects of their written language as well as the negotiation of their American regional identities through a multilingual lens at the first major moment of increased contact with outsiders.

Phillipp Schneider, German-American Civil War soldier and resident of Wisconsin since the age of 9, wrote 45 letters from March 1864 to August 1865, totaling ca. 22,500 words. I analyze these letters from a sociolinguistic perspective, considering both the unique mix of German and English usage and the socio-historical implications surrounding the letters. These are supplemented for comparison with two letters written by German-American Heritage German speaker and soldier, Jacob Goelzer, who wrote to Schneider’s sister twice in 1864. I describe the importance of when and under what circumstances these letters were written, and I also delineate instances from the letters of how the dominant community language, English, has influenced the German used and compare the use of German and English.

The present study investigates patterns of language use in the ego documents written by three Swedish immigrants: Nils Blomberg (born in 1839), Mathilda Blomberg, (b. 1863), and Anton Blomberg (b. 1885), their eldest son. The empirical foundation of the investigation is a set of 32 family letters sent over a period of nearly fifty years (1885–1934) from the rural Smoky Valley in Kansas to Mathilda’s home village in Östergötland, Sweden. We analyze the writers’ lexis, discourse patterning ( formulaic versus free-flowing ), and re-current topics, and the social roles and networks that are manifest in their correspondence. The three writers continued to correspond in the Swedish language over the years. Our diachronic analysis of their lexis and discourse patterning reveals individual variation across the authors’ production. For example, Mathilda’s correspondence contains some evidence of heritage Swedish (i.e. Swedish that has diverged from the home country, due to geographical separation and language contact with English). Across her lifespan, Mathilda integrates some vocabulary for plants, places, and jobs that diverges from the lexis she recalls from her early years in Sweden, and she draws attention to this lexical divergence for the sake of her readers. Anton, a childhood bilingual in Swedish and English, systematically translates English lexis to Swedish in letters, presumably with the goal to bring his Kansas experiences closer to his Swedish relatives. In particular, the letters, especially those by Mathilda, reveal not only how the individuals communicate information about their social roles in rural Kansas, but also their desires to maintain the networks connecting their family farm in the U.S. to Mathilda’s home village in Sweden.

Increasing migration from the nineteenth century onwards has led to the production of letters and travel diaries that allowed migrants to stay in touch with their home country. Taking the perspective of ‘language history from below’, this paper focuses on a Swiss variety of written German, as used in the diary of Matthias Dürst, and its status in relation to the standardization of written German, the local dialect, and the new majority language English. The study is couched in pre-immigration socio-economic and educational history. The paper systematically analyzes orthographic and morphosyntactic variation, as well as lexical use that are compared to the findings of Elspaß’s (2005. Sprachgeschichte von unten: Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert . Tübingen: Niemeyer) study on German migrant letters. As the results show, the text contains some influences of dialect, especially concerning diminutives and the lexicon. Moreover, the findings reveal a gradual exposure to English as the new majority language, thus settling within the focus of this special issue on Germanic languages in contact with English. The study of the diary proves once again how valuable ego-documents, and also heritage language ego-documents, are for the field of historical sociolinguistics.

It is well known that migration has an effect on language use and language choice. If the language of origin is maintained after migration, it tends to change in the new contact setting. Often, migrants shift to the new majority language within few generations. The current paper examines a diary corpus containing data from three generations of one German-Canadian family, ranging from 1867 to 1909, and covering the second to fourth generation after immigration. The paper analyzes changes that can be observed between the generations, with respect to the language system as well as to the individuals’ decision on language choice. The data not only offer insight into the dynamics of acquiring a written register of a heritage language, and the eventual shift to the majority language. They also allow us to identify different linguistic profiles of heritage speakers within one community. It is discussed how these profiles can be linked to the individuals’ family backgrounds and how the combination of these backgrounds may have contributed to giving up the heritage language in favor of the majority language.