10.1465, Review: Klintborg: Transience of American Swedish

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-10-1465. Wed Oct 6 1999. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 10.1465, Review: Klintborg: Transience of American Swedish

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1)
Date:  Mon, 4 Oct 1999 21:19:51 -0500
From:  Carl Isaacson <cisaacson at earthlink.net>
Subject:  American Swedish

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 4 Oct 1999 21:19:51 -0500
From:  Carl Isaacson <cisaacson at earthlink.net>
Subject:  American Swedish

Klintborg, Staffan. The transience of American Swedish. Lund: Lund
UP. Lund Studies in English 98. 1999.

Reviewed by Carl Isaacson, St. Olaf College

Swedish mass migration to the United States ended with the Great
Depression. By that time nearly 1.2 million Swedes had left their
homeland and arrived in America, settling primarily in the upper
Midwest and the Northwest. The intellectuals among these migrants
argued that their identity as a people would be preserved as the
language and custom of the fatherland was preserved. The success of
this attempt was, at best, dubious. As early as 1900 Swedish
American journalist Johan Enander doubted that the Swedish language
could survive more than 10 or 15 years in the United States. The
Swedes, he opined, we far too ready to become Americanized.

Despite the attempts of children's clubs, churches and lodges to
inculcate the use of "proper" Swedish, the second and subsequent
generations of American Swedes failed to master the mother tongue.
They could not, wrote novelist Gustaf Malm, because English was "the
language of their heart," and Swedish, at best, a second language.
Most Swedes in America quickly learned English for their dealings
with non-Scandinavians. Amongst themselves they spoke, and wrote, a
blended speech which came to be called "Swinglish."

In The Transience of American Swedish Staffan Klintborg studies the
bilingualism of the last generation to participate in the mass
migration from Sweden to the United States. This particular group is
not only the last mass group to be born in Sweden and emigrate to
America, they are also the last to come primarily from the working
class, elementary school educated Swedish population.

The Swedish speakers in Klintborg's study are all native born
Swedes. Second generation Swedish speakers are excluded. His source
material is tape recordings of these Swedes, made for the Emigrant
Institute in Vaxja, Sweden, between 1975 and 1985. They are all
Midwesterners. Needless to say, the Swedish of the interviewees
diverges from standard Swedish. The divergence allows Klintborg to
study fairly recent examples of common bilingual traits: code
switching, transfer, and the like.

He begins his study with a review of the pertinent literature on
Swedish-English bilingualism, helpful for any linguist or for that
matter, any culture historian. Following Quirk et al, he divides his
study between "open class" words (nouns, adjectives, verbs and
deadjectival adverbs) and "closed-class" words, (propositions,
conjunctions, adverbs, numerals, pronouns). Klintborg's findings are
unremarkable in this regard. His analysis of code-switching and
transfer among the American Swedes, however, leads him to question
sharp demarcations between code-switching and transfer. ". . . it is
often impossible to make a clear distinction between switches and
transfers . . . In English the article is a separate word and the
only bound inflectional noun morphemes are the plural and genitive
endings. In Swedish, on the other hand, indefiniteness is expressed
by a separate article and definiteness by an ending. Thus, to call
and English noun appearing with a Swedish indefinite article a
switch, but an English noun with a Swedish definite article a
transfer seems completely arbitrary."

In general, Klintborg's modest work does not call into question or
attempt to re-order the field of bilingual studies. Instead, it
"casts doubt" upon some, but not all, of the received wisdom of the
field. The modesty is well placed. For this cannot be the final word
from Klintborg. It is a grand initial work, but the study works from
data with too many gaps.

It would be helpful to know, for example, if switching and transfer
have any relationship to an individual's native language. Swedish,
at least in the pre-TV days, was not a single language, but a series
of overlapping regionalisms, often blended with other Scandinavian
tongues. Klintborg acknowledges as much in the introduction, where
he notes that code-switching from his native Gotland dialect to
standard Swedish was his first exposure to bilingualism. The
relationship between a speaker's former lexical competence and his
current habits cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, Klintborg is forced
to leave the matter to one side. Since he uses taped interviews,
some over twenty years old, he cannot ascertain the actual L1, but
assumes it to be proper Swedish. Syntacically and grammatically that
is a safe assumption. But lexically, the assumption is unsound.

Further, he does not, nor can he, examine what happens when contact
with the mother tongue is renewed. What happens to both switching
and transfer in a speaker who has returned to the homeland for a
longer or shorter stay? The question is worth putting, since the
Swedish speakers were interviewed long after Scandinavian Air
Service made it possible to return at a relatively low fair, and
telephone conversations with Sweden became affordable even for the
working class.

Finally, there is a whole new generation of Swedes in America.
Though they do not represent a mass migration similar to that which
American experienced at the beginning of the century, they are not
an insignificant group. The new migrant comes to America with a job,
an education, a family. Like previous generations they also attempt
to teach their children (many of whom are born in America) the
language of the homeland. Motivated by a potential return to Sweden
in the near term, their children must be able to speak with native
fluency.

To study and compare this group with those in the Vaxja archive
should enlighten the study of the transience of American Swedish.
With the increase in global contact, accompanied by a healthy
interest in Scandinavianism by the third generation of Swedish
Americans, it may prove that Klinrborg is as overly pessimistic
about the "transience" of the Swedish language in America as was
Johan Enander a hundred years prior. More crucial for bilingual
studies, the new Swedes in America could offer a test of the
assumptions made about the occurance of code-switching and transfer.
It just might turn out to have wholly other triggers than is
assumed.



Dr. Isaacson is Assistant Professor of Communication at St. Olaf
College, Northfield, MN. Prior to this appointment he was
Educator/Curator at the Swedish American Museum Center in Chicago.
Among his research projects are an analysis of the demise of Swedish
Theatre in Chicago as a cultural marker, and the use of American
Swedish as a class distinctive.



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