Verticalization and Language Shift in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin
Rachyl Hietpas, Language Sciences
In my talk, I examine the shift from Dutch to English in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin, an area which received extensive Dutch immigration from 1848 through the 1960s (Swierenga & Krabbendam 2012; Brown & Hietpas 2019). I utilize both speaker quotes from recordings in the community from 1966 (Daan & Heikens 1966) and 2018 (unpublished fieldwork recordings) as well as previous research (e.g. Crombez 2025) and historical documents (e.g. census and school records) to argue that language shift in the community largely overlapped with its verticalization: “a change from local control of tightly interconnected institutions to more external or ‘vertical’ control of those increasingly interdependent institutions” (Brown & Salmons 2022: 8, cf. Warren 1978). Additionally, I examine how the shift in community language use (mis)aligns with change in linguistic variables between the 1966 and 2018 recordings. Despite a shift to almost complete English use, speakers in 2018 largely maintain both Dutch syntactic (V2) and phonological (stop voicing) aspects distinct from English demonstrating how robust certain domains are to change.
