Some Pleasures and Problems of Bilingual Research

Experience in collecting 2. Relation of archiving to further work 0. The title of my paper was chosen for me by the organizers of this conference and constitutes a playful reference to the dedication in my book the Norwegian Language in America which has just come off the press (2 v., University of Pennsylvania, 1953). I intend to interpret this title in my own way, and am going to divide the topic into two parts corresponding to the expressions “pleasures” and “problems” given in the title. The first part will be an account of the process of collecting and analysis which preceded my writing of the book. The second part will deal with the problems that I envisage as being still ahead, and particularly with the function that an archive could play in helping to solve some of these problems. The first part, then, will be historical, even autobiographical if you please, while the second part will be predictive and analytical. 1. The project which I embarked upon a number of years ago was to gather the necessary materials for the description of linguistic behavior in a bilingual group. The bilingual group was the one of which I happened to be a native speaker, the Norwegian immigrants in America and their children. Afterwards I planned to analyze these materials in order to discover the effects of linguistic symbiosis in such a group. I realized that an immigrant group was not the only kind of bilingual society in the world, but wished to extract from the experiences of such a group as much guidance as possible towards solving the general problem of bilingual behavior. My hope was that I would be able to analyze and present these in a way that would be of interest not only to linguists but also to historians and sociologists. Fortunately a large body of material is already available on the history of the Norwegian group in America.