Nordmålet

Nordmålet, the northern speech, is the Scandinavian language of the Grand Duchy of Minnesota and the Upper Mississippi: co-official with English since admission in 1858, written in both the Latin alphabet and the runic row of Minnesotarunor, and spoken today by a clear majority of the Grand Duchy’s people.

It is the healthiest minority language in the United Kingdom of America, and the reasons why are not the reasons usually given. It is not healthy because it is protected, although it is protected. It is not healthy because a royal house speaks it, although one does. It is healthy because of a plainer thing that the Realm’s two other minority tongues both lack, set out below.

The name

The language is called Nordmålet in itself, the northern speech, and this is a deliberate name rather than an inherited one.

What it is not called is Swedish. The tongue began as the Swedish of the emigration and it is not that any longer: a century and a half of Swedish and Norwegian families living in the same townships, marrying, farming and worshipping together produced a single spoken language with both inside it. Calling the result Swedish is inaccurate, and calling it Norwegian is more inaccurate, and by the later nineteenth century the people speaking it had begun reaching for a word that did not choose.

Nordmålet was that word. It says north rather than Swedish or Norwegian, it belongs to both communities equally and to neither more, and it was in ordinary use for two generations before it was ever written into a statute. English-language sources, including the Realm’s own official ones, generally drop the ring and write Nordmalet, which nobody in the Grand Duchy minds and nobody in the Grand Duchy does.

Older usage survives in places. Farm families of long Swedish descent may still say svenska when they mean the language of the house, particularly in the western parishes, and families of Norwegian descent may say norsk, and neither is corrected, because both are describing the same speech.

Classification

Nordmålet is a North Germanic language of the eastern branch, descended principally from the Swedish of the middle nineteenth century, with substantial Norwegian input at every level and a large body of English loanwords.

Its nearest relatives are the modern languages of the Scandinavian Union, and the relationship is close enough to be conversational. A speaker of Nordmålet and a speaker of Stockholm Swedish can talk, and do, with effort on both sides and a good deal of repetition. Neither of them finds it comfortable and both of them find it interesting.

It is not a creole, a pidgin or a mixed language in any technical sense. Its grammar is continuously Scandinavian, its core vocabulary is Scandinavian, and its sound system is Scandinavian. What happened to it in America is what happens to any transplanted language: it kept some things the homeland discarded, took in words for the things it met here, and settled its internal variation into a common form.

Distribution and speakers

Nordmålet is spoken across the Grand Duchy and is not evenly distributed within it.

Its strongest ground is the agricultural west and the lake country, where in many townships it remains the first language of the household and the language a child arrives at school already speaking. It is strong on the Iron Range, where it had a second life in the mining towns and acquired a distinct industrial vocabulary of its own. It is weakest, relatively, in Minneapolis, whose growth drew population from across the Realm and beyond it, and where the working day is overwhelmingly in English.

By the Grand Duchy’s own returns something over three and a half million people speak it, out of a population approaching six million, and rather more than that can follow it. The figure has been broadly stable for four decades, which is the single most unusual fact in this article: it is a minority language in an English-speaking realm whose speaker numbers are not falling.

History

The emigration

Emigration from Sweden and Norway to the upper Mississippi began in the 1840s and became a flood in the decades after, and it was not a scattering. It was a chain: families followed families, whole parishes reconstituted themselves in new townships, and letters home named the specific counties where a person from a specific district would find people who spoke as he did.

The result was density, and density is what preserves a language. An emigrant who arrives among strangers learns their language within a generation. An emigrant who arrives in a township where the shop, the church, the school and every neighbouring farm speak his own does not, and neither do his children, and the question does not become urgent for a very long time.

Two nations arrived that way into the same country at the same time, and this is the fact that made Nordmålet rather than a Minnesota Swedish and a Minnesota Norwegian standing side by side. Swedish and Norwegian settlement interleaved at the township level rather than dividing at any line that could be drawn on a map. The two peoples were neighbours before they were anything else.

Admission, and the house

The territory’s admission to the Realm in 1858 produced the constitutional arrangement described in the polity’s own article: a Grand Duchy, with a bicameral Estates rather than a legislature, under a cadet branch of the Swedish royal house planted here and held permanently outside the Swedish succession, the House of Bernadotte-Minnesota.

For the language the important part is what the founding Grand Duke did on arriving, which was to learn it.

He arrived speaking the Swedish of Stockholm, which was not the Swedish of the townships and was audibly not, and the household’s decision, taken early and never reversed, was that the dynasty would speak what the country spoke. His children were raised in it. Their tutors were local. By the second generation the House of Bernadotte-Minnesota spoke Nordmålet natively and Stockholm Swedish as a formal accomplishment, which is the reverse of the arrangement anybody in 1858 would have predicted.

The consequence is the central fact of this article and is treated at length below. There is no gap in Minnesota between the language of the palace and the language of the farm. They are the same language, in the same forms, with the same vocabulary and the same verbs.

The century of settling

What followed was a long convergence, and it happened without anybody administering it.

Swedish and Norwegian are close enough that neighbours can understand each other from the first day, and close enough that sustained contact levels them. Over four or five generations the townships settled on shared forms: mostly Swedish in the grammar and the core vocabulary, with a great deal of Norwegian in the everyday words, in the farm and weather vocabulary, and in the intonation of the eastern and northern districts.

Intermarriage did most of it. A household with a Swedish father and a Norwegian mother does not conduct a linguistic negotiation; it produces children who speak whatever is spoken in that kitchen, and after a century of such kitchens the question of which language it had originally been stopped being answerable.

The name followed the fact. By the time anybody thought to legislate about the language, it had already stopped being either of the two things it came from.

The pressure that did not come

The decisive fact in the history of Nordmålet is a thing that did not happen, and the same is true of the other surviving minority tongues of the Realm.

In the world from which the Register’s own diverges, immigrant languages in the American upper Midwest were not merely outcompeted. They were legislated against. English-only schooling laws were passed, foreign-language instruction was restricted or banned outright, wartime suspicion fell heavily on communities that spoke something else at home, and a generation of parents concluded that their children would be safer without the language. Minnesota Swedish, in that world, is a memory carried by a few thousand elderly people and a great many surnames.

None of that occurred here, and the reasons are structural rather than lucky.

The language was constitutionally entrenched before the pressure could build. Co-official status was written into the admission settlement of 1858, not conceded later to a lobby, which meant that any twentieth-century attempt to restrict Nordmålet in schools or public life would have required amending the polity’s founding instrument against the wishes of most of its population. Nobody attempted it seriously.

The Grand Duchy governed its own schools. The Realm’s federal structure left education with the polities, and the polity in question was the one whose people spoke the language. There was no external authority in a position to impose an English-only classroom on Minnesota, and the Estates were never going to impose one on themselves.

The wars pointed the other way. Scandinavia stood on the Allied side and suffered for it, and Scandinavian descent in the Realm was consequently a thing to be claimed rather than concealed during exactly the decades when, elsewhere, minority languages were being abandoned in a hurry. Minnesota’s regiments were greeted home in Nordmålet. The Grand Duchy is aware that this was an accident of alignment rather than a virtue, and that a differently arranged war would have produced a different century for the language.

And the crown was in it. A polity whose head of state speaks the language natively, in public, at the opening of its own legislature, cannot easily be told that the language is a foreign encumbrance. The dynasty’s decision in its first years here to speak what the country spoke turned out, eighty years later, to be a defence nobody had designed it as.

What the Grand Duchy draws from this is a modest conclusion and it is stated modestly. Nordmålet did not survive because its speakers loved it more than the speakers of other languages loved theirs. It survived because nobody with the power to break it ever had a reason to try, and because by the time anyone might have wanted to, the instruments were already in the way.

What it kept

Nordmålet is conservative, and its conservatism is the thing Swedish visitors notice first and remark on longest.

The pitch accent

Swedish and Norwegian both carry a tonal accent, the two-way pitch distinction that gives the languages their characteristic rise and fall and that distinguishes pairs of words otherwise identical.

Sweden has been levelling it for a century, unevenly and mostly in the cities and mostly among the young. Nordmålet has not. The distinction is intact across the Grand Duchy, in all generations, and is carried by speakers who have no idea they are carrying anything, and Swedish linguists working in Minnesota have described the Grand Duchy as the largest body of conservative tonal speakers anywhere.

It is also, in practice, the feature that most reliably marks a Minnesotan speaking Swedish abroad. The words are close enough; the tune is a century old.

The plural verbs

Swedish had, in writing, a set of plural verb forms distinct from the singular. Sweden abandoned them formally in the 1940s and they had been fading from speech long before.

They were carried out of Sweden before any of that happened, and Nordmålet keeps them. The forms are ordinary, unmarked, and used by everybody; they appear in the statutes of the Grand Duchy, in its hymnals, in the ducal oath, and in the speech of a person buying fuel.

This is the divergence that most startles Swedish visitors, because it is not archaic in the way a quaint word is archaic. It is a live grammatical distinction that Sweden dismantled within living memory and that Minnesota never heard about. The Grand Duchy is not preserving them. It simply never stopped.

The words Sweden dropped

The vocabulary is full of nineteenth-century rural Swedish and Norwegian that the homelands have since shed, and much of it concerns things Minnesota still does.

Words for parts of a plough, for kinds of snow and kinds of ice, for the operations of haymaking, for weather that is about to turn, for the specific tasks of a dairy, and for degrees of cold survive here in quantity, because the work survived here in quantity. A Swede from a city meets a good deal of vocabulary in a Minnesota farm kitchen that he last encountered, if at all, in a nineteenth-century novel.

The reverse also holds and is mentioned less often. Nordmålet lacks a great many ordinary modern Swedish words, because it was not present when Sweden coined them, and it has generally filled those gaps from English rather than from Stockholm.

What it did not do

Here Nordmålet parts company sharply with the Realm’s other minority tongues, and the contrast is worth drawing precisely.

It borrows heavily from English and it does not sound like English. The loanwords are numerous and thoroughly naturalised, taking Scandinavian gender, Scandinavian plurals and Scandinavian verb endings, and they are used without any sense of foreignness. But the sound system underneath them did not move. The r stayed Scandinavian. The vowels stayed Scandinavian. The pitch accent, as above, is more conservative than Sweden’s own.

Compare louisianais, which did the opposite and did it thoroughly: it held its grammar with remarkable firmness and let its sound go over to America, so that the r softened toward English and a Parisian hears the language as archaic and anglicised in the same breath.

Two languages in the same Realm, under the same pressure from the same dominant language, moved in opposite directions. Nordmålet took English words into a Scandinavian mouth. Louisianais kept French grammar in an American one. Neither outcome was planned and neither community regards its own as remarkable.

Sound and grammar

Nordmålet is an ordinary Scandinavian language and a reader who knows Swedish will find almost all of it familiar. What follows is the shape of it, and the handful of places where a Swede is brought up short.

The sound

The consonants and vowels are those of nineteenth-century eastern Swedish, with regional colouring from Norwegian, and they have moved very little.

The r is a front consonant, tapped or lightly trilled depending on district, and it did not go over to the American r. This is the single most audible difference between Nordmålet and the other minority languages of the Realm, and it is the reason a Nordmålet speaker’s English is accented in a way that is instantly identifiable while their Nordmålet is not accented at all.

The vowel system is full and conservative, including the rounded front vowels that give Scandinavian its character and that speakers of English find difficult. The distinction between long and short vowels is intact and carries meaning.

The tonal accent, described above, is the feature Swedish scholars come for. Both accents are distinguished, in all districts and all generations, in a language whose homeland has been losing the distinction for a century.

The result is that Nordmålet sounds Scandinavian to a degree that surprises visitors who expect an American-inflected relic. It is the vocabulary that has come to America. The mouth has not.

Nouns and the definite article

Nordmålet has two genders, common and neuter, as Swedish does, and assigns them reliably, including to English loanwords.

Its definite article is suffixed, again as in Swedish: definiteness is marked by an ending on the noun rather than by a separate word in front of it. This is the feature that most confuses English speakers learning it, and it is also the mechanism by which English loans are most thoroughly digested, since a borrowed noun that has taken a Scandinavian definite ending is no longer in any meaningful sense an English word.

Adjectives agree, in gender, in number and in definiteness, and the agreement is intact.

Verbs

Verbs conjugate for tense and, unlike modern Swedish, for number.

The plural forms are set out above and are the language’s most conspicuous grammatical divergence. Beyond them the verb system is regular and unremarkable: two main tenses formed simply, compound tenses with the expected auxiliaries, and a passive formed either with an ending or with an auxiliary, both of which are in ordinary use.

The subjunctive has receded to set phrases, prayer and the law, which is the same position it holds in Swedish, and its survival in legal drafting is why the statutes of the Grand Duchy read older than its newspapers.

Word order

Nordmålet is verb-second, as all the mainland Scandinavian languages are: the finite verb takes the second position in a main clause regardless of what occupies the first.

English is not, quite, and the interference runs one way. Nordmålet speakers do not put English word order into their Nordmålet. Nordmålet word order surfaces constantly in the English of the Grand Duchy, especially in speech, and it is one of the two or three features that make Minnesota English identifiable anywhere in the Realm.

How English words are taken

Borrowing is heavy, systematic and complete, and the system has three steps that speakers apply without thinking.

A borrowed noun is assigned a gender, takes Scandinavian plural endings, and takes the suffixed definite article. A borrowed verb enters the largest and most regular conjugation and is inflected like any other verb in it. A borrowed adjective takes the agreement endings.

The consequence is that the loans do not sit in the sentence as foreign bodies. They are Nordmålet words that arrived recently, and the language reaches for them freely in exactly the domains where it has no inherited vocabulary: machinery, commerce, government, medicine, sport and the whole apparatus of the modern working day.

This is why the language can be simultaneously conservative and full of English, which visitors often present as a contradiction and which is not one. The grammar decides what a language is. The vocabulary only decides what it can talk about.

Varieties

Nordmålet is not uniform, and its internal variation maps the settlement rather than the geography.

Western and prairie Nordmålet is the most conservative and is usually treated as the reference form: the fullest vocabulary, the clearest plural verbs, the least English. It is the speech of the agricultural west, and it is what a Swedish researcher is taken to hear.

Lake and northern Nordmålet carries the heaviest Norwegian element, in both vocabulary and intonation, because Norwegian settlement was densest there. Speakers from the west describe it as singing, which is meant kindly and is phonetically accurate.

Range Nordmålet, of the Iron Range, is the outlier and knows it. The mining towns drew Finns, Poles, Italians, Croats, Cornishmen and Slovenes alongside the Scandinavians, and the register that grew there took vocabulary from all of them, moves in and out of English more readily than any other variety, and has an intonation the rest of the Grand Duchy finds comic. It is also the variety with the strongest tradition of song and of political speech, for reasons the Range would explain at length.

City Nordmålet, in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, is the newest and the least marked: fewer regionalisms, more English, and a slight levelling of the vocabulary toward whatever is shared. It is spoken by fewer people as a proportion than any rural variety and by more people in absolute number than any of them, which is the ordinary arithmetic of cities.

None of these is stigmatised. The Grand Duchy has no standard variety in the sense that Sweden has one, and a speaker of Range Nordmålet reading the statutes aloud in the Estates is reading them in his own forms and nobody thinks about it.

Writing

Nordmålet is written in two alphabets and has been throughout its existence.

The Latin alphabet does the ordinary work: the newspapers, the schools, the statutes, commerce, correspondence and every printed book. The runic row, treated fully in the article on Minnesotarunor, carries the ceremonial and the monumental: the ducal oath, seals, coinage, foundation stones, boundary marks and a large proportion of gravestones, along with an unlegislated domestic use on tools, beams and the things people make by hand.

The row is an emigrant survival of the same kind as the plural verbs. It came out of Dalarna, where runes had never stopped being ordinary folk writing, and it stayed in use here after it died there. Minnesota therefore writes in a script its ancestral countries abandoned, using verb forms its ancestral countries abandoned, in an accent its ancestral countries are losing, which is a consistent enough pattern to be a thesis: what emigrates gets frozen, and what stays home keeps moving.

Official status

Nordmålet is co-official with English throughout the Grand Duchy, and the guarantee was written in at admission rather than added later.

The practical content is substantial. Proceedings of the Estates may be conducted in either language and routinely move between them. Statutes are enacted in both and both texts bind. A resident may be tried, taxed, schooled, registered and served in either. Every school teaches both, along with both alphabets. Public signage is bilingual as a matter of course rather than as a matter of policy.

What the guarantee conspicuously does not do is require anything of anybody. There is no requirement that an official speak Nordmålet, no language test for office, no quota and no penalty. The Grand Duchy has never needed one, because the language’s position rests on the number of people who speak it rather than on any instrument, and everybody involved understands that an instrument would be the weaker of the two supports.

Schooling

Every school in the Grand Duchy teaches in both languages, and this is the machinery on which everything else rests.

The arrangement is not immersion in the sense used elsewhere in the Realm, where a minority language is taught to children who do not have it. Most Minnesota children arrive at school already speaking Nordmålet, or already following it, and the schools’ task is the ordinary one of teaching a population to read and write the languages it already speaks. Both alphabets are taught in the first years, Latin for everything and the runic row alongside it.

Subjects divide by convention rather than by rule, and the convention varies by district. In the agricultural west a child may be taught most subjects in Nordmålet with English as a subject in its own right. In Minneapolis the proportions reverse. Everywhere, the sciences and anything technical tend to be taught in English, for the straightforward reason that the vocabulary is English and inventing a parallel one has never seemed worth the trouble.

The Grand Duchy’s universities teach principally in English, publish principally in English, and conduct a substantial minority of their humanities and legal work in Nordmålet. The law faculties are the exception in the other direction: Minnesota law is drafted in both languages, both texts bind, and a lawyer who cannot read the Nordmålet text is not fully equipped.

What the system does not do is produce a hierarchy. There is no examination in correct Nordmålet, no certificate, and no professional advantage in speaking one variety over another. A schoolteacher correcting a child’s Nordmålet is correcting spelling, not speech.

Print, press and broadcast

Nordmålet has a continuous published literature going back to the emigration and a press older than the Grand Duchy.

The newspapers came first, founded in the settlement decades, and several survive: bilingual now, with Nordmålet and English columns on the same page and a readership that moves between them without noticing. Their language is the most conservative printed Nordmålet in ordinary circulation, and they are consulted as a record of usage for that reason.

Books are published steadily and unspectacularly. The Grand Duchy sustains a small publishing industry in Nordmålet: fiction, local history, agricultural and technical manuals, poetry, and a very large devotional and hymnological output. Translation runs both ways, and the translation of Swedish and Norwegian books into Nordmålet is a real activity, which visitors find surprising and which follows directly from the vocabulary gap: a modern Swedish novel contains a great many words the Grand Duchy has never used.

Broadcast is where the language is heard most. The Crown broadcaster maintains a full Nordmålet service in the Grand Duchy, and the agricultural and weather programming is the most-listened output in the polity by a wide margin, for the same reason it is in Wisconsin: a farmer needs the forecast, needs it early, and wants it in the language he thinks in. The ice reports of the winter months are a genuine public service and are delivered with a precision the English versions do not attempt.

There is no film industry to speak of and no great tradition of theatre. The Grand Duchy’s cultural production in its own language is weighted heavily toward the printed, the sung and the broadcast, which is a fair description of the country generally.

Names

Naming is the layer of Nordmålet that reaches furthest into families that have otherwise gone over to English, and it is the one an outsider meets first.

Patronymic surnames arrived with the settlement and were frozen by it. The naming system that produced them was still live in Sweden and Norway when the emigration happened and was abolished at home afterwards; here the names simply became hereditary surnames and stayed. The consequence is a Grand Duchy in which a very large proportion of the population carries one of a small number of surnames, and in which distinguishing families requires other machinery.

The machinery is farm names and nicknames, used constantly and semi-officially. A person is identified by the farm, the township, the trade or the father, appended or prefixed, and these attributions are stable across generations and appear in ordinary speech, in the newspapers, and on gravestones beneath the legal name.

Given names run to a fixed and slowly changing stock, drawn from both traditions, with the Norwegian and Swedish forms of the same name treated as interchangeable variants. It is common for a person to be registered under one and called by the other.

Place names are the visible layer, and they are three-fold: Dakota and Ojibwe names, in quantity, carried over and often reshaped; Scandinavian names brought from the home districts, sometimes duplicating a parish in Sweden or Norway exactly; and English names from the administration and the railways. The Grand Duchy’s map is therefore trilingual, and the three layers correspond to three phases of its history in an order that is not flattering to the middle one.

The crown that speaks it

The House of Bernadotte-Minnesota speaks Nordmålet as its first language, and has since the second generation after admission.

This is not ceremonial competence. The Grand Duke does not have a Nordmålet for public occasions and a Swedish or an English for private life. He speaks the language of the Grand Duchy in the same forms as everybody else, with the same plural verbs, the same tonal accent, the same rural vocabulary and the same naturalised English words. Household correspondence is in it. The children are raised in it.

The effect on the language is difficult to overstate and easy to misdescribe, so it is worth being exact about what it does and does not do.

What it does not do is confer prestige from above in the usual sense. There is no court form of Nordmålet, no refined register that speakers of the ordinary language are made to feel short of, and no institution charged with saying what correct Nordmålet is. Sweden has an academy. Minnesota does not, and has repeatedly declined to create one.

What it does is remove a gap that in most places exists. In a polity where the reigning house, the Estates, the courts, the churches, the schools and the farm kitchens all use the same forms of the same language, there is no rung of the ladder at which a speaker is told that what they have at home is not the real thing. A child in a western township does not learn a prestige variety at school and go home to a despised one. There is only the one.

Why it thrives

Three minority languages of the Realm have now been described in this encyclopaedia, and set beside one another they make an argument that none of them makes alone.

Louisianais is the best-protected French in the Union. It is constitutionally guaranteed, it is taught, it has a Language Office, a ministry, a standing committee of the Assemblée, and a sworn ducal patron. It is also failing, and the mechanism is documented by the Grand Duchy of Louisiane itself under the name language hollowing: the state guarantees French, delivers an international standard in its schools and its written instruments, and the tongue the grandmother speaks is left outside the guarantee. The protection is real and points at the wrong variety.

Wisconsindeutsch has almost no protection and survives comfortably. It is not an official language, its homeland’s interest in it is regarded with suspicion, and its speakers have arranged matters so that it is worth nothing to anybody. Its print standard and its speech are the same language, and there is no ladder to fall off.

Nordmålet has the protection Louisiane has, the register unity Wisconsin has, and a reigning house speaking it besides. It is thriving.

The variable, set out this way, is not protection at all. It is whether the prestige form and the home form are the same tongue. Where they are, a language can be official or unofficial, patronised or ignored, and it will hold. Where they are not, no quantity of guarantee will save it, because every institution built to protect it will teach the wrong variety, and the guarantee will be honoured in a language that nobody’s grandmother speaks.

Minnesota did not discover this and did not design for it. It simply never developed a high form, because the people who would have imposed one were the same people who spoke the low one, and the family that might have brought a court language from abroad decided in its first years here not to.

The Grand Duchy is aware of the comparison and is not smug about it in public. In private, Minnesotan officials asked about the Louisiane apparatus tend to say the same thing, which is that they would not know what to do with a Language Office and would be frightened of what it might decide.

Where it lives

Nordmålet is not confined to a domain, which is what distinguishes a healthy minority language from a surviving one. It is nonetheless strongest in six places, and the six say a good deal about the country.

Farming and the land. The largest technical vocabulary in the language, and the one least penetrated by English. Soil, drainage, seed, stock, machinery, seasons and the specific operations of a mixed farm are discussed in Nordmålet by people who would discuss a bank loan about the same farm in English.

Winter, ice and weather. The other great vocabulary, and the one visitors find hardest. The language distinguishes many kinds of ice by bearing strength, appearance and age, many kinds of snow by what can be done with it, and many degrees and characters of cold. This is practical knowledge encoded in words, in a country where being wrong about ice is a way to die, and it is transmitted early and precisely to children.

The ice vocabulary deserves its own note, because it is the part of the language that visitors most often assume is folklore and that is in fact technical.

Nordmålet distinguishes ice by bearing strength, which is the only distinction that matters to somebody deciding whether to walk on it, and it does so with a series of separate words rather than with adjectives attached to a general one. It distinguishes ice that formed in still water from ice that formed in moving water, ice that has been snowed on from ice that has not, ice that is thickening from ice that is rotting from beneath while looking identical from above, and the specific treacherous condition of ice near an inflow. There are further words for the sounds ice makes, which are diagnostic, and for the appearance of a surface that will not hold.

This is knowledge that kills people when it is absent. It is taught to children early, in Nordmålet, in the specific words, and it is one of the very few areas where the Grand Duchy’s English-speaking households borrow the Nordmålet terms wholesale rather than translating them, because the English equivalents do not exist and improvising one on a lake in March is not advisable.

The winter vocabulary more broadly runs the same way: many words for snow according to what can be done with it, for the qualities of cold, for the states of a road, and for the precise stages by which a thaw arrives. It is the clearest demonstration in the language of the ordinary principle that vocabulary follows work, and it is the reason the Crown broadcaster’s ice reports are delivered in Nordmålet first.

The church and the hymnal. Both traditions, Swedish and Norwegian, brought their hymns, and the Grand Duchy’s hymnal is a merged one. Congregational singing in Nordmålet is universal, includes people whose everyday speech has gone over to English, and is the single most reliable place to hear the language at its most conservative.

The Estates and public ceremony. Debate, the opening, the oath, the reading of statutes and the whole apparatus of public dignity. The Estates move between Nordmålet and English constantly and without comment.

Food and the table. Everyday, unremarkable, and the layer that reaches furthest into families that have otherwise lost the language.

The Iron Range. A distinct industrial register grown in the mining towns, with its own vocabulary for ore, shifts, machinery and grievance, and its own accent, marked by contact with the many other languages the Range drew in. Range Nordmålet is recognisably its own thing and is teased affectionately everywhere else in the Grand Duchy.

The Norwegian inside it

The Norwegian element in Nordmålet is not a borrowing layer. It is structural, it is everywhere, and it is the reason the language needed a name of its own.

Norwegian forms are ordinary in the farm and weather vocabulary, common in the everyday words of the household, and dominant in the intonation of several districts. A great many speakers cannot say which of their words came from which language and have never had occasion to wonder. The two communities’ descendants are in most parishes the same people.

This is not a story of a merger without friction. The Grand Duchy’s oldest domestic argument runs between its two Scandinavias and touches the dynasty, the churches, the place names, the county histories and the question of whose settlement the polity commemorates. Norwegian Minnesota has real grievances about the Swedish house on the ducal throne and about a century of Swedish precedence in the polity’s official self-description.

The language is not one of the grievances. Nordmålet is jointly owned, jointly named, and carries both traditions in its own body, and neither community has ever seriously claimed it against the other. Along with the runes, it is one of the two things the two Scandinavias of Minnesota agree about without qualification, and the coincidence that both of those things are ways of speaking is noticed in the Grand Duchy and drawn upon in speeches.

Sweden and Norway look at it

Both homelands take an interest and the interest is not the same.

Sweden is engaged, curious and slightly proprietorial. Swedish linguists have worked in the Grand Duchy since the 1920s, the conservative tonal accent and the surviving plural verbs are studied here because they cannot be studied at home, and the Swedish academic view of Nordmålet is that it is a treasury. The Swedish public view, where one exists, is warmer and more patronising, and treats the Grand Duchy as a museum of a Sweden that no longer exists, which Minnesotans find both accurate and irritating.

Norway’s attention is more recent and rather more careful. The Norwegian element in Nordmålet was under-recognised for most of the twentieth century, by Swedish scholarship that came looking for Swedish and by a Grand Duchy whose official self-description was Swedish-first, and the correction of that record has been a Norwegian project of the last fifty years and a successful one.

When a Minnesotan and a Swede converse, both manage, and both find the other quaint. The Swede hears a nineteenth-century countryside with American nouns in it. The Minnesotan hears a language that has mislaid its verbs and flattened its tune, delivered at speed by somebody who keeps using words for objects that have no equivalent here.

The Treaty Nations

The Grand Duchy shares its territory with the Dakota and Ojibwe nations, whose senators sit in its upper house, and an honest account of Nordmålet has to record that the linguistic contact between them is slight.

There are place names, in quantity, and they are the layer everybody notices. Beyond them there is very little: a handful of words in each direction, no significant body of bilingual speakers, no shared vocabulary of work, and no tradition of literature or worship in common.

The reason is not mysterious and is not creditable. The Scandinavian settlement of Minnesota took place on land taken from these nations, in a period when the settled policy of the Realm was to remove their languages from their children, and the two populations were kept apart by design in the decades when a shared vocabulary might otherwise have formed. Nordmålet’s own health rests on township density, which is to say on a settlement pattern that was possible because the land had been cleared of the people already on it.

The Grand Duchy’s modern constitutional arrangements with the Treaty Nations are genuine and are described in the polity’s article. The linguistic record is separate from them, is thin, and should not be written up as a friendship it was not.

The opening of the Estates

The most-heard formal Nordmålet in the Grand Duchy is the annual opening of the Estates, at which the Grand Duke speaks in the ordinary language of the country to a chamber that answers in it.

The passage below is the fixed opening, unchanged in wording, and it is the plainest available demonstration of the point this article has been making: the sentences a Grand Duke says on the most formal day of the constitutional year are sentences that could be said in a farm kitchen, in the same forms, with the same verbs.

Three details in four sentences carry the whole argument.

Vi äro and I veten and talen and tänken are the plural verbs: four of them in a short passage, entirely unremarkable to everybody in the room, and comprehensively extinct in the country the speaker’s family came from.

Talen på det mål ni tänken på, speak in the language you think in, is not a courtesy to English speakers, although it functions as one. It is the constitutional position of a bilingual chamber stated in a sentence, and it is why the Estates move between the two languages without anybody remarking on it.

And the whole passage is plain. There is no elevated register, no archaism beyond the verbs that everybody uses anyway, and no vocabulary a farmer would not have. It is the most formal sentence the Grand Duchy produces in a year, and it is in the same language as everything else.

Trivia

See also

• Minnesotarunor, the runic row in which the language is cut
• Olav, the reigning Grand Duke, who speaks it as his first language
• The Grand Duchy of Minnesota and the Upper Mississippi, the polity whose language this is
• Daily Life: Minnesota, the country the language lives in
• Wisconsindeutsch, the tongue that survives by being worth nothing
• Louisianais, the tongue that fails despite being protected
• The Kingdom of Sweden and the Scandinavian Union, the homelands that kept moving
• American English, the national English it lives beside

Categories

Society & Daily Life · Nordmålet · The Grand Duchy of Minnesota · Language · Culture