As discussed in Chapter Four, language was tied to religion in both the Swedish and Norwegian immigrant communities, but it was a tie more closely felt and held by the churches themselves rather than the people, a quite different situation than what occurred in the Dutch community, specifically the CRC Dutch community. As a result, the
"language question" was resolved differently.
5.6.1 The Swedish Americans
The 1880s saw a rise in Swedish migration to the United States after the initial push in the 1850s. This surge provoked a decades-long debate within the community as to the place and purpose of the Swedish language as it related to identity and ethnicity. The viewpoints in contention can be found in the following arguments made at the time.
Writing in 1904, and promoting what one might call the ultra-conservative view, E. Zetterstrand stated,
This much ought to be clear to everyone that when we lose the Swedish language we will also lose our national character, in which there are traits that are truly worthy of our preservation, qualities more precious than silver and gold, and which we ought therefore to protect and preserve as a precious inheritance for
The Augustana Synod, the arm of the American Swedish Lutheran church, perhaps made more realistic after fifty years of losing members to the issue, argued first for the middle ground in 1900:
English [is now] the language through which the Swedish-Americans must make their most important contribution in the national American arena…But a people that demonstrates no ability to resist, no conservatism, cannot exert any lasting influence on others. It would therefore be a bad sign, if our Swedish-American people underwent this process too rapidly. (In Hasselmo, 1976, p.38).
And again in 1923:
[Swedish-Americans] need not change from Swedish to English ; they can with advantage preserve the old while they acquire and even after they have acquired the new. (In Hasselmo, 1976, p.38).
Others called for the full eradication of Swedish, a view interestingly held strongly by the secular Swedish-American press, even though they understood it would end their own industry. An editorial in Svenska Tribunen stated,
In America Swedish is only a transitional language…Let us hope—Tribunen says straight out—that Swedish will not be our children's language. At least may they understand that it should be regarded more as an ornament, a noble but not indispensable pleasure. From Tribunen's viewpoint it naturally follows that even
newspapers in the Swedish language belong only to a transitional phase. (In
Ultimately, the debaters would not be the ones to settle the debate. As is most common in language contact situations where a minority immigrant language is embedded in the society of a majority national language, the "deciders" were the children, the second- generation immigrants who adopted English and abandoned Swedish.
The second-generation effect occurred readily in the Swedish-American communities because immigrants saw an opportunity for an "exchange": They would learn English from their children, and their children would learn Swedish from them. Parents were encouraged by the Augustana Synod in child-rearing methods that would serve to encourage bilingualism:
To present Swedish as a kind of sacred liturgical language or to seek to warn against English as 'something tempting and sinful in itself' would be the surest way to kill the younger generation's interest in the ancestral tongue. Instead, parents should use Swedish in the home. (Barton, 1994, p.120).
When the children—as is not uncommon for children raised bilingual—refused to speak Swedish, the household became English-speaking. A study conducted in the Swedish stronghold of Minneapolis in 1917-18, discussed by Hasselmo (1976), illustrates this shift nicely:
For children with Swedish-born parents, English was used as the home language in only 33% of the cases. For children whose parents had resided in this country for 30 years or more, English was used as the home language in about 83% of the cases (p.40).
There was a further reason why Swedish children resisted speaking Swedish: their lack of self-confidence in their proficiency in it, reinforced by the opinions of their elders.
Ernest Beckman noted in 1875:
Swedish seems difficult and awkward to them [the children]. In English, they speak as properly as anyone else; when they open their mouths to speak Swedish, what comes out is a peasant dialect, which they are ashamed of. (In Barton, 1994, p.52).
Even those who tried to preserve the language through careful study were not rewarded for the effort. Pastor Per Pehrsson who visited from Sweden in 1910 certainly felt that preservation of Swedish was crucial to the preservation of Swedish faith, heritage, and identity, but that did not prevent him from criticizing the Swedish spoken in America as being learned only through writing and not through discourse:
At the heart of preservation of the Swedish heritage lies the preservation of the Swedish language [but the speech of Swedish Americans sounds] as though from a book. (In Barton, 1994, p.199).
Writing at the same time, G.H. von Koch was even less kind in describing the Swedish spoken in America:
It usually consists of a combination of broad dialect and convoluted book language. And it cannot be denied that this mixture seems curiously old-
fashioned, if not lifeless. One misses the nuances which life, day by day and year by year, add to a language and which make it the most precise gauge of national and individual culture. (In Barton, 1994, p.199).
Not coincidentally, the 1920s saw the steep decline of the Swedish-American press. As an interesting footnote, the 1930s saw the rise of an English-language
publishing industry in Sweden. Its books sought to highlight not only Swedish history, to educate an English-speaking, presumably ethnically Swedish readership in the states, but also to highlight the accomplishments of Swedish-Americans in "the building of America [whose] tone, naturally, is warmly self-congratulatory" (Barton, 1994, p.326).
5.6.2 The Norwegian Americans
Like the CRC Dutch, the early Norwegian Lutheran churches placed great value on the preservation of the mother tongue due to their belief in its strong correlation to faith. Haugen (1969) points out that their attitudes did not escape criticism in the wider community, and in this way, they did differ from the CRC Dutch. In the Norwegian community, the church felt itself to be the sole voice in the fight to preserve the language. A physician of the community, writing in Friheds-Banneret stated this sentiment clearly:
[The clergy and church] wish to continue here as in Norway to hinder the enlightenment of the people, to preach incomprehensible traditions as infallible truths, and deny the children of Norwegians the right to go to American schools before they are confirmed (in Haugen, p.39).
The author clearly held negative opinions about the church in general, and not just its position on the language issue.
This is quite different from the Dutch of Holland and Grand Rapids, regardless of their affiliation, be it RCA or CRC. The Dutch Seceders had come to America precisely
because they had great faith in their church and clergy. As a result, they were far more likely to support their clergy's position on matters of how best to live in America.
As with the Dutch Americans, the language question in the Norwegian American communities would hinge in part on the language of the schools. Haugen (1969)
described a similar strong resistance to Norwegian schools in his study. He refers to a nineteenth-century newspaper, Friheds-Banneret, and its editor's plea that "instruction in the English language, as carried on in the public schools, is and remains the foremost means of advancing the enlightenment of the younger generation." Haugen concludes that "such advice was heeded ... the efforts that were made from some quarters to establish Norwegian day schools were almost wholly unsuccessful" and that
contemporary reports suggested "the learning of English came easily to most Norwegians and that they were eager to take their place in the communities where they settled" (p.38).
The quality of the schools was also in question for some of the immigrants. Andreas A. Hjerpeland, a schoolteacher, came to Minnesota in 1870 at the age of thirty- five. He maintained a twenty-year correspondence with his friend, Ivar Kleiven. Writing in 1877, he discusses the quality of the schooling available for members of the
Norwegian community:
According to your wishes, I will tell you a bit about the school system here. There are public schools everywhere, where the ordinary school subjects are taught: reading, writing, Arithmetic, geography, and grammar. School is held in well-equipped schoolhouses, usually for seven or eight months of the year. The cities are full of higher schools and universities, so the youth have good
church, the public schools have no religious instruction, leaving that up to the parents themselves. This is the reason the Norwegians, as well as other
nationalities, establish parochial schools, so that the children will receive religious instruction. But the parochial schools have a low status ... There are not enough qualified teachers, the school session is too short, and the buildings are poor. It is quite difficult to hold Norwegian school here ... (in Zempel, 1991, p.12).
With such a large gap in the quality of the two systems, it is understandable why parents saw in the English language and the public schools the true opportunities for their children.
The ability to learn English quickly was a point of pride for many Norwegians, and it appears it was a stereotype held by many Americans as well. Ole Munch Ræder was a Norwegian political commentator and scholar. He visited America in 1847-1848 to report on Norwegian immigrants in the United States, and his "letters" were published in a Norwegian newspaper. One letter in particular displays this stereotype of rapid
assimilation:
The ease with which the Norwegians learn the English language has attracted the attention of the Americans, all the more because of the fact that they are
altogether too ready to consider them entirely raw when they come here. 'Never,' one of them told me a few days ago, 'have I known people to become civilized so rapidly as your countrymen; they come here in motley crowds, dressed up with all kinds of dingle-dangle just like the Indians. But just look at them a year later: they speak English perfectly, and, as far as dress, manners, and ability are
their original mode of dress certainly could not make Indians out of them and that they were not entirely devoid of culture or those habits of diligence and regularity which one expects to find in a well-ordered and civilized society, even among the poorest classes out in the country, but he seemed scarcely disposed to make any concessions on that point (in Malmin, 1929, p.37).
Ræder does not contest the accuracy of the rate of linguistic assimilation, however, choosing only to debunk the negative stereotypes but not the one he clearly feels is positive.
5.7 A Consideration of the Potential Effects of Other Sociolinguistic Variables