His family were migrant farmers who had fled the Dust Bowl conditions of Oklahoma in the mid-1930s.

[2] Norman entered the University of Chicago in the autumn of 1954 and majored in Russian, but was forced to withdraw after two years because of financial problems.

[3] After completing his military service, Norman enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.A.

[4] While at Princeton, Norman traveled to Taiwan to perform in field research on Taiwanese Hokkien, and in 1969 he received a Ph.D. from Berkeley with a dissertation entitled "The Kienyang Dialect of Fukien".

While at Princeton, Norman met and married Stella Chen, and together they had four children.