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The article reports on the efforts of linguists and historians in raising awareness about the endangered language known as Elfdalian, now believed to be a language that deviated from Old Norse and separate from Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article by Tom Shippey which focuses on the Old Norse sirklanti in the April 3, 2014 issue.

An interview with actress Anita Briem is presented. Briem is noted as making her U.S. film debut in the 2008 film "Journey to the Center of the Earth." Originally from Iceland, she states that she speaks Icelandic when she wants to disguise profanity. She comments on whether she is an adventurous person.

The article presents information related to the meanings of two words, Purler, and Ging. The word Purler had two meanings while lexicographers tell that both meanings have their roots in a Norse word. The author states that it's no great stretch to think that purler may be a shortening of superlative. Regarding the word Ging, it is stated that though said to have been once widely used in New South Wales, this word for a shanghai chicken seems to have been the exclusive domain of Western Australia.

English is quickly becoming the Nordic countries' lingua franca. Most children in Scandinavia now learn English from the age of nine or ten, or even younger. In the academic world, nobody can expect to prosper without a good command of English. Pia Jarvad, a linguist at the University of Copenhagen, has categorized all the university's theses, articles and books in 1999 by the language they were published in and found that 84% of doctoral theses in the natural sciences were in English, against 14% in Danish. Danes and Swedes, who can understand each other's language well enough, nevertheless often use English for business meetings.T he use of an outside language does avoid some Nordic complications. For example, Norway's 4.5m people are already having to cope with two national languages. There seems little danger that any of the Nordic languages are about to go out of business. Some of the region's more nationalist parties, such as the Danish People's Party, oppose the spread of English. Iceland puts up the most spirited defence of its language, which is closest to the Old Norse once spoken across northern Europe. Its 1,000-year-old sagas were passed down orally, not in written form.