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This study traces the learning opportunities children and young people had for learning Swedish in a heritage community in Kansas, 1870 to 1974. Reasons for knowing Heritage Swedish varied across this time-period, as analyses of historical materials, written and spoken, show. Despite the different reasons—among them, being able to speak with family members and neighbors, becoming a member in the Swedish Lutheran immigrant church, competing in oratorical contests, gaining employment in certain professions, and later, knowing elementary Swedish grammar—the educational opportunities were made possible by heritage language anchors who helped counteract verticalizing forces from elsewhere.

Language ideologies often have powerful effects on communities as their members decide which language(s) should be used in specific settings. Notably, the process of language shift from an immigrant or minority language to the language of a dominant group can move at different speeds depending on ideology. Our study examines the language ideologies expressed by members of congregations founded by Swedish immigrant groups in the 1800s. 

In the Swedish-American arm of the Evangelical Lutheran church, the language question—whether to shift from Swedish to English—was not completely settled for many years. Some church leaders called for a rapid shift to English (what we term the discontinuity perspective), others believed that both languages could and should exist side-by-side (the parallel approach), and still others viewed the preservation of Swedish in the sanctuaries as one of the central ways churches could serve their members (the continuity perspective). All three perspectives on language use were supported by narratives of a combined religious and linguistic ideology that helped shape Swedish-American identities.

Our study examines the language question, which found expression in numerous and complex ways: theological and hagiolectal (e.g., ‘If we pray in English, will God recognize us?’); sociolinguistic (‘If we adopt English, will we drift too far from the mother church in Sweden?’ or ‘If we continue using Swedish in our churches, will our children be isolated from American society?’); economic survival (‘How many members will we lose if we continue using Swedish in the liturgy and sermons?’); and recruitment (‘Will we be able to appoint a Swedish-speaking pastor when we need one in the coming years?’).

Those ideologies are placed against the backdrop of language shift through the social participation element of Warren’s (1978) verticalization model, previously applied to language shift among German-Americans by Brown (2022).

The present study investigates patterns of language use in the ego documents written by three Swedish immigrants: Nils Blomberg (born in 1839), Mathilda Blomberg, (b. 1863), and Anton Blomberg (b. 1885), their eldest son. The empirical foundation of the investigation is a set of 32 family letters sent over a period of nearly fifty years (1885–1934) from the rural Smoky Valley in Kansas to Mathilda’s home village in Östergötland, Sweden. We analyze the writers’ lexis, discourse patterning (formulaic versus free-flowing), and re-current topics, and the social roles and networks that are manifest in their correspondence. The three writers continued to correspond in the Swedish language over the years. Our diachronic analysis of their lexis and discourse patterning reveals individual variation across the authors’ production. For example, Mathilda’s correspondence contains some evidence of heritage Swedish (i.e. Swedish that has diverged from the home country, due to geographical separation and language contact with English). Across her lifespan, Mathilda integrates some vocabulary for plants, places, and jobs that diverges from the lexis she recalls from her early years in Sweden, and she draws attention to this lexical divergence for the sake of her readers. Anton, a childhood bilingual in Swedish and English, systematically translates English lexis to Swedish in letters, presumably with the goal to bring his Kansas experiences closer to his Swedish relatives. In particular, the letters, especially those by Mathilda, reveal not only how the individuals communicate information about their social roles in rural Kansas, but also their desires to maintain the networks connecting their family farm in the U.S. to Mathilda’s home village in Sweden.

The aim of the present study is to survey the dynamism of language shift in the use of Heritage Swedish and American English in textual space over a span of 150 years (1850 through 2005). This socio-historical linguistic investigation employs the Communities of Practice framework to understand the social forces associated with variable patterns of bilingualism in Lutheran congregations. Analysis is performed on texts written by groups of parishioners, namely by members of parish councils and by cookbook committees, in four Midwestern Swedish-American churches. Dimensions of time, localities, and demographics are examined in observing the patterns in the writers' production of texts in dual languages. Extant evidence from the parish cookbooks reveals that most of the contents were written in English at an earlier stage than were the annual meeting minutes of the parish councils. In two of the congregations investigated, annual minutes were written in Swedish for more than sixty years. Despite the relatively early shift to English by the cookbook committees in all four parishes, the committees nonetheless promoted the use of Swedish lexis in the names of recipes, particularly in the second half of the 1900s. The cookbook committees thus preserved components of Heritage Swedish long after the documents written by parish councils had switched to English. The dynamism of the language shift in the four local congregations is compared to the previous research carried out on the national level of the Swedish-American Lutheran church.

Recipe names and other elements in the discourse of cookbooks reveal important clues about language contact in communities settled by immigrants. In the case of cookbooks printed in Swedish-American networks, a number of recipe collections have been periodically updated and re-published. Linguists who tap into this printed material can thus carry out longitudinal discourse analysis of the names of recipes and of menu items to be served on a smorgasbord. The present study examines cookbooks produced in selected localities and reports on linguistic patterns found in the cookbooks published in two small towns in central Kansas as well as in the urban centers of Kansas City and Chicago. The data are analyzed for evidence that Swedish, Heritage Swedish, and English have co-existed in varying proportions across the time period of study, which is 1895 to 2005, and across geographical space in the American Midwest. Looking at the phenomena of heritage as expressed linguistically, and to some extent to be understood notionally in the cookbook data, we describe the linguistic landscapes which have shaped the discourse of Swedish-American homes and entertainment practices. We employ the theoretical framework of enregisterment in order to account for how volunteer cookbook committees create local authenticity.