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Wisconsin talk: Linguistic diversity in the Badger State ed. by Thomas Purnell, Eric Raimy, Joseph Salmons

2014; Linguistic Society of America; Volume: 90; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lan.2014.0039

1535-0665

Wayne O’Neil,

Lexicography and Language Studies

Reviewed by: Wisconsin talk: Linguistic diversity in the Badger State ed. by Thomas Purnell, Eric Raimy, Joseph Salmons Wayne O’Neil Wisconsin talk: Linguistic diversity in the Badger State. Ed. by Thomas Purnell, Eric Raimy, and Joseph Salmons. (Languages and folklore of the Upper Midwest.) Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. Pp. 173. ISBN 9780299293338. $24.95 (Pb), $16.95 (e-book). Beginning in the early twentieth century, the Wisconsin Idea, applied to education, obligated the University of Wisconsin to serve the people. Service took ‘the form of experimentation in dairying and farming methods, rural education through local farm institutes, medical and public health services, and expert assistance in drafting social and labor legislation’ (Workers of the Wisconsin Writers’ Program 1941:121–22). In this context, what is a linguist to do? In the mid-twentieth century, it was what Einar Haugen did for the Norwegian language of the Midwest (1953) and what Frederic Cassidy did for the varieties of Wisconsin English and later, in Cassidy & Hall 1985–2013, for the country as a whole. Thomas Purnell, Eric Raimy, and Joseph Salmons, the editors of Wisconsin talk, have carried this tradition on into the age of the internet (http://csumc.wisc.edu/wep/), their work fittingly supported in part by the Wisconsin Idea Endowment. This book is a print summary of some of that work. For discussion of the origins and development of the Wisconsin Englishes Project, its place in linguistics education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and its outreach into Wisconsin’s language communities, see Purnell et al. 2013. The book consists of ten short chapters bookended by a foreword, Salmons’s preface, and the editors’ introduction, and Salmons’s conclusion and outlook. In keeping with the spirit of the Idea, the book serves the people with a nontechnical, clear, and very enjoyable examination of the languages of Wisconsin: no grammatical rules or derivations, and no tree graphs, with only a stray IPA symbol here and there. Following the preface and the editors’ introduction (an overview of the chapters to follow), Wisconsin talk begins in the beginning, with Karen Washinawatok and Monica Macaulay’s discussion of the history and state of the native languages of Wisconsin (15–25), with an emphasis on revitalization projects (e.g. Ho-Chunk and Menominee) and methods (immersion and master-apprentice programs). They acknowledge that ‘language revitalization is a tough road to follow … . But it can also be exciting and exhilarating, and many members of the native communities of Wisconsin are devoting their lives to it’ (24). Felecia Lucht surveys the ‘Older immigrant languages’ (26–36) of Wisconsin, of which German and Polish are the most prominent, 45% of Wisconsinites claiming German ancestry in [End Page 545] 1990, 15% Polish ancestry (69, 72). An immigrant language that is older but new to Wisconsin is Pennsylvania Dutch. Figure 2.4 (35) shows nearly as many Wisconsin speakers of this thriving language as of Italian (~5000) in 2006–2008, though elsewhere in this volume, it is claimed the Pennsylvania Dutch population in the state has reached ~10,000 (xiii). Nevertheless, speakers of German, even at this late date, still dominate the older language landscape: there are in excess of 35,000 (35). Lucht’s chapter leads directly to Antje Petty’s on Wisconsin’s German-language schools (37–57), with mention of the state’s other immigrant language schools. Lucht concludes that the history of these schools ‘refutes the myth that immigrants in the past immediately gave up their tongues in favor of English’ (55). In fact, in part, Wisconsin’s German-language schools were established to provide the schooling that German immigrants ‘had become used to’ in Germany and that was more demanding than public school education in the state in the mid-nineteenth century when Germans began to arrive in Wisconsin in large numbers (40–42). Kristin Speth’s ‘Non-Wisconsin sound of southwest Wisconsin’ (58–67) looks first at the Cornish English that influenced English in that area of the state, characterized by loss of initial /h/ and Ah for I, for example, which was the result of the immigration of Cornish...