Variation across individuals and domains in Norwegian heritage language

Abstract

This paper investigates spontaneous production from 50 speakers of Norwegian heritage language in the Corpus of American Nordic Speech and studies the interplay between four linguistic properties: possessives and double definiteness, verb second word order, grammatical gender, and the amount of language mixing. It is shown that speakers cluster in the sense that some speakers produce more Norwegian-like structures across properties, whereas others produce more English-like structures across the same properties. Implications for the study of heritage grammars are also addressed.