Argentine Danish

Beskrivelse

Danish immigration to Argentina began in the 1840’s, peaked in the period 1890-1920 and stopped in the 1930s. The number of Danish immigrants to Argentina was comparatively small: Only around 13,000 Danes immigrated, and ca. 5,000 returned to Denmark. The Danish immigrants settled primarily in Buenos Aires and on the Pampa southwest of Buenos Aires, in the area that was to be known as “the Dane Triangle”. Later, in the 1920s, Danes also colonized the jungle in Misiones around the city Eldorado, together with mostly German-speaking immigrants. In spite of the numerical smallness, the Danes formed strong and endogamous networks, including cultural and educational institutions such as schools, churches, sports clubs, and traditional Danish ‘Folk High School’ activities. However, the strong feeling of Danishness and support for Danish-cultural organization and activities began to decline in the early 1970s. From then on Danish culture has slowly crumbled away, and the language began a slow journey towards an inevitable language death. We do not know the exact number of those Argentine Danes who can still speak Danish, but we know that most of them only use Spanish in their daily lives. The 150+ years of close contact between Danish and Argentine Spanish has resulted in ‘Argentine Danish’, the variety today mostly spoken by the older generations of the Argentine Danish group. The presentation is based on the research project Danish Voices in the Americas 2014-2018, during which a database of Argentine Danish consisting of 600,000 words was established (Corpus of South American Danish, CoSAmDa). The CoSAmDa constitutes the empirical foundation of linguistic research on Argentine Danish. Our research has shown that Argentine Spanish has left its marks in Argentine Danish phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax. However, apart from influence from Argentine Spanish, Argentine Danish also shows signs of what may be called ‘attrition’, and language-internal development. The talk will give examples of these developments and it will address the internal sociolinguistic and noticeable interspeaker variation observed in the data. Selected publications Hansen, Nadia (2016): En snert af dansk mellem pampa og urskov: Det danske i to danskerkolonier i Argentina [A touch af Danishness between the Pampa and the jungle. (Ed. by Jan Heegård & Karoline Kühl.) https://danskestemmer.ku.dk/resultater/publikationer/En_snert_af_dansk_mellem_pampa_og_urskov_Nadia_Hansen.pdf Heegård Petersen, Jan (2018): Much more ‘mere eller mindre’ (‘more or less’), in Jan Heegård Petersen and Karoline Kühl (eds.): Argentine Danish. Selected Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas (WILA 8). http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wila/8/paper3428.pdf. Heegård Petersen, Jan. (Submitted). Hypo-correction and Argentine Danish /ts/. Heegård Petersen, Jan & Karoline Kühl (2018): Argentinadansk: Argentinadanskernes særlige ordforråd [Argentine Danish: The special vocabulary of the Argentine Danes]. Mål & Mæle 2018, 2. 10-16.

Periode	11 okt. 2019
Begivenhedstitel	German(ic) Language Minorities in Latin America: Methods, Basics, Case Studies
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	Eichstätt, Tyskland, BayernVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International