Search

We propose a rapid adaptation of FAVE-Align to the Nordic languages, and we offer our own adaptation to Swedish as a template. This study is motivated by the fact that researchers of lesser-studied languages often neither have sufficient speech material nor sufficient time to train a forced aligner. Faced with a similar problem, we made a limited number of surface changes to FAVE-Align so that it – along with its original hidden Markov models for English – could be used on Stockholm Swedish. We tested the performance of this prototype on the three main sociolects of Stockholm Swedish and found that read-aloud alignments met all of the minimal benchmarks set by the literature. Spontaneous-speech alignments met three of the four minimal benchmarks. We conclude that an adaptation such as ours would especially suit laboratory experiments in Nordic phonetics that rely on elicited speech.

Typologically, the Old and Middle Scandinavian languages preserve features lost in Modern Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish), especially zero arguments and inactive constructions. Both phenomena present difficulties for the analysis of the Old and Middle Scandinavian languages as configurational, and generative linguists often choose a reductionist strategy, claiming that at the level of deep structure, configurational structure persists. Based on Middle Danish, my claim will be that zero arguments are semantically different from – and therefore cannot be reduced to – pronouns, and secondly, that inactive constructions do not have oblique subjects, but oblique first arguments (A1s). The meanings of the case forms nominative and oblique differ, depending on their constructional context. Any functional theory must respect the relevant grammatical sign contrasts of the language analysed, not try to explain them away.

The paper presents examples of meta-morphomes (a kind of morphomic patterns, involving syncretisms) in North Germanic. There has been some debate over the notion of such patterns, and the aim is therefore to present relatively clear cases. Five cases are presented, involving inflection in verbs, nouns and adjectives. The syncretisms are all ‘unnatural’; they do not make much sense for syntax, semantics or phonology. While patterns that are obvious to the linguist are not necessarily obvious to speakers, the paper presents diachronic evidence that these morphomic patterns have been noticed by speakers. At least some criticism against ‘morphomic’ analyses is based on implausible premises: An analysis in terms of features is not automatically preferable only by being possible; the idea of ‘taking morphology seriously’ is untenable; the claim that the morphomic approach is a mere enumeration of facts may involve a self-contradiction.

In this paper I investigate the early language contact between North Frisian and Danish. Since we have no direct evidence for this language contact apart from the layer of medieval Danish interferences in Modern North Frisian, the question arises, whether it is possible to say anything about the specific type of language contact that has taken place in the Middle Ages on the basis of the modern language data and with the help of language contact theory. Taking the lead of van Coetsem’s language contact theory, I discuss two phenomena in the (morpho)syntax of Modern North Frisian, the placement of directional particles and the inventory of verbal particles, and argue that they point to a language contact situation in which a considerable number of Danish-speakers shifted to North Frisian.

This article gives a summary of the Faroese data concerning argument placement in the Nordic Word order Database (NWD). Special emphasis is put on carefully describing the different conditions tested in the argument placement experiment, the experimental set-up, and the demographic information of the participants. An overview of relevant parts of Faroese grammar is also given, as well as a summary of the word order patterns found in the Faroese data present in the database. Finally, we discuss how the data in the database provides new insights to the grammar of Faroese, and how the data patterns in Faroese differ from the patterns observed in the other North Germanic languages.

This study looks at the relative frequency of ‘bad language’ according to gender in Nordic languages and in English in a 210-million-token corpus of messages by 18,686 Nordic Twitter users. For the...

Early runic inscriptions are the best evidence for the oldest historical development of North Germanic. Yet among the many unexpected features of the inscriptions as they are usually presented is the apparent presence of vowels before glides that seem to occur contrary to Sievers’ Law. These include perhaps most prominently the sequence usually read as on the Skåäng stone where the Vimose comb preserves the expected form . Rather than assume that a Neogrammarian sound law is violated in a runic text, a more profitable approach is usually to assume that it is the interpretation that is at fault. Many of the instances where Sievers’ Law vocalizations seem to occur in an aberrant manner are texts that are better explained in manners other than have traditionally been accepted.

Elsewhere I have proposed a set of rules according to which we may categorise Germanic root nouns into three chronological layers. In this article, I present a synchronic classification of all of the Elfdalian actual and potential root-noun continuants as well as their etymologies and derivational histories in light of this proposal and in order to reveal (i) some interesting aspects of the general processes involved in shifts of inflectional class, and (ii) whether or not some of these processes in Elfdalian when compared to other Nordic varieties may shed light on the cladistical status of Elfdalian within North Germanic. The analysis shows that, while those Elfdalian root-noun continuants whose ancestral forms belong to layers I, IIa and IIb generally remain stable and keep their appurtenance to the root-noun inflectional class, some of the (non-)root-noun continuants actually and potentially belonging to layer III deserve additional attention with regard to this twofold aim.

Endamálið við hesi grein er tvíbýtt. Øðrumegin er tað at útvega eitt yvirlit yvir setningsgerðir við S1 (sagnorð-eitt), S2 (sagnorð-tvey) og S3 (sagnorð-trý) í høvuðssetningum í íslendskum og føroyskum, og roynt verður at kanna, í hvussu stóran mun tey bæði nær skyldu málini bera seg at á sama hátt í hesum sambandi. Dáturnar, ið verða lagdar fram her, stuðla hugsanini, at íslendskt og føroyskt hava líkar setningsgerðir við atliti at møguleikum fyri S1 og S3. Hinvegin verður víst á nøkur áhugaverd undantøk, serliga í sambandi við at hava negativ ávirki fremst í føroyskum (S3). Hinumegin verður serliga hugt at møguleikum fyri stílførslu sum S2-fyribrigdi í høvuðssetningum í íslendskum og føroyskum. Ført hevur verið fram, at stílførsla er meira avmarkað í eykasetningum í føroyskum enn hon er í íslendskum. Tað skuldi tí bent á, at føroyskt mennir seg sama veg sum danskt, norskt og svenskt, har ið stílførsla er um at vera púra burtur. Við støði í tí skuldi væntast, at stílførsla eisini er á veg út í høvuðssetningum. Samanberingar av stílførdum eindum av ymsum slag fremst í setningi, sum eru gjørdar í hesi kanning, vísa, at bæði málini geva seg undir avmarkingar av sama slag. Tó eru ávísar setningsgerðir við stílførslu munandi meira avmarkaðar í føroyskum enn í íslendskum., The goal of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it provides an overview of V1 (verb-first), V2 (verb-second), and V3 (verb-third) constructions in main clauses in Icelandic and Faroese, and it seeks to explore to what extent the two closely related languages behave the same way in that resepect. The data presented here support the idea that Icelandic and Faroese have similar conditions with respect to the possibility of V1 and V3. However, some interesting exceptions are pointed out, in particular regarding the fronting of negative objects in Faroese (V3). On the other hand, special attention is given to the possibility of Stylistic Fronting (SF) as a matrix V2-phenomenon in the Insular Scandinavian languages. It has been claimed that SF is more restricted in embedded clauses in Faroese than it is in Icelandic, suggesting that Faroese is evolving in the direction of the Mainland Scandinavian languages, where SF has all but disappeared. Based on that, one might expect that SF is also on its way out in main clauses. The comparison of stylistically fronted elements of various kinds conducted in this study shows that both languages obey similar restrictions. However, certain SF-constructions are much more restricted in Faroese than in Icelandic.

The Hanse played not only a prominent economical role in the North Atlantic but the Germans also consistently influenced the culture of the people with whom they interacted and traded. Their presence led to a sort of cultural colonialism in Northern Europe, which, among others things, substantially shaped the Scandinavian languages. For several reasons, the Icelandic language was not influenced in the same way as the other Scandinavian languages; yet, one can find some traces of German in administrative language dating back to the Middle Ages. Furthermore, ‘cultural colonization’ by the Germans also certainly took place through the Reformation in Iceland. It was the German merchants who took the first seeds of the new faith with them to Iceland and marked their ‘conquest’ by building a Lutheran church. In this way, the merchants – like colonialists – claimed a space on foreign ground for themselves, where language played a very central role.

There was a strong influence from the Low German language on the languages in Scandinavia in late medieval times due to the considerable economical and cultural contact and interaction between northern Germany and the Scandinavian countries in this period, especially the Hanse trade. The vocabulary was especially affected, but also the grammatical structure and names. Some place-names from south-western Norway seem to reflect Low German influence. The loans from Low German are well integrated and adjusted to the structure of the Scandinavian languages.

T his article discusses the collective names of trees used in the Scandinavian languages, as well as the formation process of similar collective names in Eastern and Western Germanic. It should be emphasized that the Northern Germanic languages used the suffix *-ijan for creating collective nouns which denote ‘a group of trees’, e. g. ON. birki n. coll. ‘birch forest’, Icel. birki ‘birch forest; birch’, Norw. birki ‘birch forest’, Swed. björke ‘birch forest, birch grove’ (< PG. *berkijan n. coll. ‘a group of birches, birch forest, birch grove’  PG. *berkō f. ‘birch, Betula’). The same suffix denoting collectivity and originating from the Proto-Indo-European language is also present as *-ьje in most Slavic languages, cf. Ru. dial. берéзье n. coll. ‘birch forest, birch twigs’; OPol. brzezie n. ‘birch grove or forest’; Cz. březí n. ‘small birch-grove’, also břízí n. ‘birch twigs, birch-wood’; Slovak brezie n. ‘small birch-forest, birch-grove’; SC. bre ̑ z je n. coll. ‘birch forest’, Sloven. brẹ̑ zje n. ‘id.’ (< PSl. *berzьje n. coll. ‘group of birches, birch forest, birchgrove’  PSl. *bȅrza f. ‘birch, Betula’). Further possible traces of the same suffix can be found in the Baltic languages (cf. OPrus. pannean n. ‘mossy fen’ vs. Go. fani n. ‘mud’, OSax. feni n. ‘fen’) suggesting that the Proto-Indo-European collective suffix can be reconstructed as *-ii̯ o m (n. coll.). It seems probable that some northern Indo-European tribes used the derivative word *bhe r ̥h 2 ĝ i i̯ o m (n.) to denote ‘a group of birch trees’, especially ‘a birch grove’ or ‘a birch forest’.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/APULTP.2020.40.140-155 This article contains systematic and detailed analysis of morphological and semantic parameters of Germanic preterite-present verbs, dividing them into major and minor subgroups. The development of both preterite-present subgroups and their steady transformation into the modal verbs is a specific feature of all Germanic languages. Since the modal verbs of the Modern Germanic languages are morphologically defective, it is commonly assumed that preterite-present verbs of the old Germanic languages lost some of their morphological features in the process of turning into modal verbs. The semantic aspects of this process are rather obscure. All Germanic languages were losing some preterite-present verbs in the process of transformation from the Gothic language, which had fourteen preterite-present verbs. In OE there were twelve preterite-present verbs. Six of them survived in NE. The morphological description focuses on the finite and non-finite forms of the preterite-present verbs, which belong to the minor subgroup. The detailed description helps to see the origin and development of the minor subgroup in the new light. The description encompasses the data of classical Indo-European languages and Old Germanic languages. The authors emphasize the expediency of turning to the theory of preterite/strong verb origin, the verbs in question may be regarded as inter-group, hybrid units. In order to gain insight into the origin of the Germanic languages it is necessary to look into the history of the Gothic and West Germanic and North Germanic languages. The authors find it useful to compare common and different phenomena, highlighting individual specific processes taking place in the process of development of the Germanic languages. These languages are analyzed on different stages of their development, but inline with the view that the languages co-operated and coexisted in the same area. The data given in the article are used to analyze the problem implementing comparative grammar tools. The authors were particularly careful to take all grammatical forms into consideration while working with the lexical units from the ancient sources. Some additional information was taken from Greek, Latin and Sanskrit to produce reliable and consistent comparison of the German language with the rest of Indo-European languages. Key words: preterite-present verbs, Germanic languages, Common Germanic roots, semantic derivation, grammatical cooperation. Information about the authors: Botsman Andriy Vasylovych – Ph.D. in Chemistry, Ph.D. in English Philology, Associate Professor; Associate Professor of the Department of English Philology and Intercultural Communication; Institute of Philology; Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Dmytruk Olga Viktorivna – Ph.D. in English Philology, Associate Professor; Associate Professor of the Department of English Philology and Intercultural Communication; Institute of Philology; Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. E-mail: a.botsman@knu.ua; o.dmytruk@knu.ua REFERENCES Bennet, W. H. (1980). An Introduction to the Gothic Language. New York: Modern Language Association, 190 p. [in English]. Braun, F. (1922). Die Urbevölkerung Europas und die Herkunft der Germanen. Berlin: Halle a.d. Saale. 278 s. [in German]. Braune, W. (1981). Gotische Grammatik. Auflage. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 205 s. [in German]. Feist, S. (1924). Indogermanen und Germanen. Berlin: Halle a.d. Saale. 348 S. [in German]. Gamkrelidze, T. V. & Ivanov, Vjaceslav V., Jakobson, R. et al. (2010). Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and Proto-Culture. Part I: The Text. Part II: Bibliography, Indexes. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 864 p. [in English]. Gregersen, S. (2019). Anna Wojtyś. 2017. The Non-Surviving Preterite-Present Verbs in English: The Demise of* dugan, munan,*-nugan,*þurfan, and unnan. Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 51. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 258 pp., 12 tables. Anglia, 137(1), 163-167. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2019-0012 [in English]. Heyne, M. (1906). Deutsches Wörterbuch. Berlin: Halle. 1298 s. [in German]. Holthausen, F. (1934). Gotisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Berlin: Halle a.d. Saale. 1376 S. [in German]. Jellinek, M. H. & Hermann, P. (Ed.). (2017). Geschichte der gotischen Sprache. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 209 S. [in German]. Kluge, F. (1913). Ungermanisch. Strassburg: Halle. 348 S. [in German]. Lehmann, W. (1986). A Gothic Etymological Dictionary. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. 712 p. [in English]. Menge, H. & Güthling, O. (1910). Menge-Güthling griechisch-deutsches und deutschgriechisches Wörterbuch, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Etymologie. Berlin: Halle a.d. Saale. 989 s. [in German]. Mossé, F. (1949). Manuel de la langue gotique. Textes. Glossaire. Paris: Aubier. 272 p. [in English]. Plotkin, V. (2008). The Evolution of Germanic Phonological Systems: Proto-German, Gothic, West Germanic, and Scandinavian. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press. 230 p. [in English]. Randall, W. & Jones, H. (2015). On the early origins of the Germanic preterite presents. Trans Philologic Soc, 113: 137-176. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12045 [in English]. Rauch, I. (2003). The Gothic language: grammar, genetic provenance and typology, readings. New York: P. Lang. 192 p. [in English]. Snædal, M. A Concordance to Biblical Gothic. (1998). Reykjavík: Institute of Linguistics, University of Iceland; University of Iceland Press. Vol. 1 = Introduction. Texts; pp. xxxiv, 70. Vol. 2 = Concordance. 1257 p. [in English]. Stig, K. J. George. (2018). The preterite-present: an investigation into the underlying origin process. (PhD diss., University of Aberdeen), 483 p. [in English]. Tomaszewska, M. (2019). The evolution of surviving English preterite-present verbs (āgan, cunnan, *durran, *magan, *mōtan, *sculan): a corpus-based study. (PhD diss., UniwersyteWarszawski), 256 p. [in English]. Voyles, J. B. (1992). Early Germanic Grammar: Pre-, Proto-, and Post-Germanic Languages. San Diego, California: Academic Press. 302 p. [in English]. Wright, J. (1997). Grammar of the Gothic Language. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 366 p. [in English]. Wright, J. & Wright, E. M. (1925). Old English Grammar (3rd edition). London: Oxford University Press, 870 p. [in English].

The aim of the present study is to follow the development of the suffixed definite article in North Germanic, in particular taking into account the unique reference expressed by the nascent article. The study is based on the corpora of Old Swedish, Old Danish and Old Icelandic texts written between 1200 and 1550. Both qualitative and quantitative methods, such as logistic regression models, are applied. The study is grounded in the notions of familiarity and uniqueness, which we explore diachronically. The results indicate that the use of the definite article is much more frequent in familiar than in unique contexts in North Germanic in the periods studied, as a greater proportion of NPs with direct anaphors is definite in the oldest extant texts, as well as throughout the later periods, than the proportion of NPs with unique referents. NPs with unique referents are further shown to constitute a non-uniform group, where the ‘more local’ unique NPs (grounded in specific knowledge) appear more frequently with a definite article than the ‘more global’ unique referents (grounded in encyclopaedic knowledge).

In this article, we present the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD), with a focus on the rationale behind it, the methods used in data elicitation, data analysis and the empirical scope of the database. NWD is an online database with a user-friendly search interface, hosted by The Text Laboratory at the University of Oslo, launched in April 2019 (https://tekstlab.uio.no/nwd). It contains elicited production data from speakers of all of the North Germanic languages, including several different dialects. So far, 7 fieldtrips have been conducted, and data from altogether around 250 participants (age 16–60) have been collected (approx. 55 000 sentences in total). The data elicitation is carried out through a carefully controlled production experiment that targets core syntactic phenomena that are known to show variation within and/or between the North Germanic languages, e.g., subject placement, object placement, particle placement and verb placement. In this article, we present the motivations and research questions behind the database, as well as a description of the experiment, the data collection procedure, and the structure of the database

This paper discusses three typological differences between the North Germanic DP and the West Germanic DP. While North Germanic has suffixal definite articles leading to cases of double definiteness, weak adjective endings regulated by definiteness, and doubly-filled definite DPs, West Germanic does not. These three properties cluster together in that they all have to do with definiteness. It is claimed that they can be subsumed under one more general difference. Assuming various subcomponents of definiteness, it is proposed that these components originate low in the structure. North Germanic arranges these components into several individual feature bundles. Some of these bundles move to D, while others remain lower in the structure. Consequently, definiteness components are spelled out separately in different positions. In contrast, West Germanic involves one complex feature bundle containing all definiteness components. In this language family, all of the components move to D as one bundle and, as a consequence, they are all spelled out as one determiner.

In this study, we present an analysis of gender assignment tendencies in Jamtlandic, a language variety of Sweden, using a word list of 1029 items obtained from fieldwork. Most research on gender assignment in the Scandinavian languages focuses on the standard languages (Steinmetz 1985; Källström 1996; Trosterud 2001, 2006) and Norwegian dialects (Enger 2011, Kvinlaug 2011, Enger & Corbett 2012). However, gender assignment principles for Swedish dialects have not previously been researched. We find generalizations based on semantic, morphological, and phonological principles. Some of the principles apply more consistently than others, some ‘win’ in competition with other principles; a multinomial logistic regression analysis provides a statistical foundation for evaluating the principles. The strongest tendencies are those based on biological sex, plural inflection, derivational suffixes, and some phonological sequences. Weaker tendencies include non-core semantic tendencies and other phonological sequences. Gender assignment in modern loanwords differs from the overall material, with a larger proportion of nouns assigned masculine gender.

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to diachronic generative syntax in the North Germanic languages. With the introduction of generative grammar in the late 1950s the historical perspective became less prominent within linguistics. Instead, contemporary language, normally represented by the researcher’s own intuitions, became the unmarked empirical basis within the generative field, although there were some early pioneering studies in generative historical syntax (e.g. Traugott 1972). It was not until the introduction of the Principles and Parameters theory in the 1990s that diachronic syntax emerged as an important domain of inquiry for generative linguists. Since then, the study of syntactic change has added a temporal dimension to the overall enterprise to better understand the nature of variation in human language.

The project ‘The Norse Perception of the World’ is building a digital infrastructure to facilitate interdisciplinary research on medieval worldviews as recorded in East Norse texts. It does so by collecting spatial material, i.e. attestations of place names and other location-based data from medieval vernacular manuscripts, early prints, and runic inscriptions from fictional, non-biblical, and scientific texts dated to before 1530, and providing free access to these spatial references through a tailored back-end MySQL database and an interactive end-user interface with mapping via Leaflet and Leaflet.markercluster. This paper discusses how geocoding can be problematic when applied to pre-modern materials, as the concept of space is a temporal and social variable, especially when dealing with ideas about places abroad. The geospatial visualization employed by the project has no ambition to represent a historically correct worldview as understood by medieval Scandinavians. Rather, it is an anachronistic tool for managing and obtaining an overview of the spatial references in East Norse texts.

This paper addresses the controversy between Koeneman & Zeijlstra (K&Z) (2014) and Heycock & Sundquist (2017) concerning the viability of K&Z’s strong version of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis in the light of apparent counterexamples from the diachrony of Danish. It makes the general point that establishing whether or not cases of putative V-to-I movement in subordinate clauses can be reanalyzed as V-to-C, i.e. as embedded Verb Second (EV2), depends on the EV2-type of a language. The empirical discussion concerns appositive relatives and conditional protases, with V-to-C in the former being in principle compatible with ‘narrow’ nEV2 as displayed by Modern Mainland Scandinavian languages, and V-to-C in the latter with Old Norse-style ‘broad’ bEV2. It is concluded that the critical stages of Danish need to be scrutinized more closely before the above dispute can be settled.

The paper deals with the assumed correlation between morphological and syntactic phenomena, especially the one that has its roots in a parametric approach to syntax since (Chomsky 1981). Its main focus is on testing predictions presented in two works (Bobaljik and Thráinsson 1998 and Holmberg 2010a). These papers connect verbal morphology with a clustering of syntactic phenomena in the Scandinavian languages and maintain that morphological evidence – in the form of ‘rich’ verbal agreement – signifies a positive setting of a parameter that in turn makes certain syntactic patterns possible. In the present paper it is shown how this relation works when tested on a group of Ovansiljan vernaculars (East Scandinavian non-standard varieties). Five of these vernaculars have retained verbal agreement in number and person, whereas two others have not. It turns out that the hypotheses encounter difficulties when faced with the Ovansiljan data.

Old Icelandic literature, genetics and historical demography regarding Sámi-Scandinavian early contactsThe spreading of Sámi interference features to the North Germanic languages is confirmed not only by the Old Icelandic sagas, which show us an absolute acceptance of the Sámi in the North Germanic society and marriages between the two nations, but also by the populational genetics that show that the percentage of the “Sámish” haplogroups (Y-DNA N1c, mtDNA U5 and V) among the North Germanic people exceeds considerably the percentage of the modern Sámi population, which indicates a language shift and assimilation of a part of the Sámi (especially of the Southern Sámi). Changes in the population structure caused by two pest pandemics (in the seventh to ninth and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) that affected Northern and Central Scandinavia to a much lesser degree could also contribute both to the spreading of the Sámi genes in Northern and Central Scandinavia and of the Sámi interference features in the North Germanic languages.

Monolingual lexicography for Norwegian started some decades after political independence from Denmark in 1814. Since 1885 two written standards have been recognized, one based on Danish as spoken in Norway (today Bokmål), and one based on the Norwegian vernacular (Nynorsk). Both are fully described in major scholarly dictionaries, now completed and freely available on the web. Both receive some public funding, with a view to further development. Because of frequent orthographic revisions, at first aimed at bringing the written standards closer to each other, spellers dominated the market through most of the 20th century. Today linguistic stability is aimed for, incorporating only such changes in the written standards as are supported by general usage. The first general monolingual defining dictionaries Bokmålsordboka and Nynorskordboka, covering the central vocabulary of each written standard, were first published as parallel volumes in 1986, and are now undergoing revision at the University of Bergen in cooperation with the Language Council of Norway. These dictionaries are now stored in databases, are available on the web and as a free smartphone app. Public funding of monolingual mother tongue lexicography is seen as an investment in essential linguistic infrastructure, as is bilingual lexicography between the Nordic languages and Norwegian, while other bilingual lexicography is dealt with by private publishers.

This study examines positive low- and high-grade assessments in service encounters between customers and salespersons conducted in Swedish and recorded in Sweden and Finland. The assessments occur in a regular sequential pattern as third-turn moves that complete request-delivery sequences, longer coherent requesting sections, or request sequences in a pre-closing context. The positive valence of the assessments coheres with the satisfactory outcome of task completion, but their function is primarily pragmatic, used for segmenting the flow of task-oriented institutional interaction. The assessments stand as lexical TCUs, and their delivery is characterized by downgraded prosody and the speaker's embodied shift away from the other. The analysis reveals distributional differences in the interactional practice: Customers produce task-completing assessments more often than the salespersons, and high-grade assessments are more frequent in the data from Sweden than from Finland. The data are in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish with English translations. Interaktion och variation i pluricentriska språk (IVIP).

This article compares Wikipedia as an arena and source for the public through analysis of articles on “Islam” across the three Scandinavian languages. Findings show that the Swedish article is continuously revised and adjusted by a fairly high number of contributors, with comparatively low concentration to a small group of top users. The Norwegian article is static, more basic, but still serves as a matter-of-factly presentation of Islam as religion to a stable amount of views. In contrast, the Danish article is at once more dynamic through more changes up until recently, it portrays Islam differently with a distinct focus on identity issues, and it is read less often. The analysis illustrates how studying Wikipedia can bring light to the receiving end of what goes on in the public sphere. The analysis also illustrates how our understanding of the online realm profits from “groundedness,” and how the comparison of similar sites in different languages can yield insights into cultural as well as political differences, and their implications. acceptedVersion

Work in sociolinguistic typology and creole studies has established the theory that intensive language contact involving second language acquisition by adults tends to lead to grammatical simplification. This theory is built on many anecdotal case studies, including developments in the history of Continental North Germanic associated with contact with Middle Low German. In this paper, we assess the theory by examining two changes in the history of Norwegian: the loss of coda /Cr/ clusters and the loss of prepositional genitives. If the theory is correct, these changes should have been innovated in centers of contact with Middle Low German. We find that both changes in fact spread into southeastern Norwegian from Swedish. Since contact with Low German also took place in Sweden and Denmark, this is consistent with the theory. It opens questions for future research about the role of dialect contact in simplificatory change in North Germanic.

Terms associated with birds of prey that kill with their feet („Grifftoter“) are widely used in the West and North Germanic languages as heads or modifiers in field names, place names and aquatic names. Above all, the names of the larger birds such as eagle, vulture, hawk and falcon often have descriptive heads that refer to structures in the natural environment (such as Falkenburg, -stein, -hagen etc.). However, the range of expressions and meanings of these names is strongly characterized by polysemy, heteronymy, and generalisations. The analysis of dialect dictionaries results in large-scale diatopic word fields with a juxtaposition of proper and substitute words of birds of prey, with mixed zones, avoidance of synonymy („Synonymenflucht“), gaps or hyperlexicalizations that give rise to misunderstandings. The article shows that not only the distinctiveness according to striking characteristics, but also the cultural-ecological validity is important for the classification of the birds of prey. – Conclusion: The lexical naming motive underlying the names of birds of prey is by no means always clear; a name like Ahrensbok may well mean a hawk wood.

For the North Germanic opposition between two tonal accents, it has been claimed that Accent 2 has a lexical tone, that Accent 1 has a lexical tone, that both accents are marked tonally in the lexicon, or that the accent opposition is based on two types of feet. Based on evidence from compounding, we argue that the opposition between Accent 1 and Accent 2 is equipollent, and that this is best expressed in a foot-based approach since each lexical item will necessarily receive a foot. Elaborating on previous metrical work on tonal accent, we assume that binary feet can be built on moras (= Accent 1) or syllables (= Accent 2) and show how this successfully captures compound accentuation in Central Swedish and Urban East Norwegian. Our foot-based analysis is in line with recent work on tonal accent that calls into question the claim that all tonal contrasts within syllables must be due to the presence of lexical tone. In addition, our analysis addresses issues surrounding the phonology of compounds in general, and prosodic effects of compounding in particular.

© CopyrightEPLA, 2020. We introduce a stochastic model of language change in a population of speakers who are divided into social or geographical groups. We assume that sequences of language changes are driven by the inference of grammatical rules from memorised linguistic patterns. These paths of inference are controlled by an inferability matrix which can be structured to model a wide range of linguistic change processes. The extent to which speakers are able to determine the dominant linguistic patterns in their speech community is captured by a temperature-like parameter. This can induce symmetry breaking phase transitions, where communities select one of two or more possible branches in the evolutionary tree of language. We use the model to investigate a grammatical change (the rise of the phrasal possessive) which took place in English and Continental North Germanic languages during the Middle Ages. Competing hypotheses regarding the sequences of precursor changes which allowed this to occur each generate a different structure of inference matrix. We show that the inference matrix of a "Norway hypothesis" is consistent with Norwegian historical data, and because of the close relationships between these languages, we suggest that this hypothesis might explain similar changes in all of them.

This article questions the prevalent account of North Germanic tonogenesis, which proposes that at the outset, Accent 2 was characterized by a double-peaked melody close to the one found in central Swedish today (Riad 1998, Kingston 2011). The spreading patterns observed in the data analyzed here are difficult to reconcile with this hypothesis. My analysis instead offers support in favor of the alternative hypothesis that the phonetic roots of the accentual contrast are to be found in a difference in timing between single peaks, specifically, peak delay in plurisyllabic domains, but not in mono-syllables due to lack of space. The variation observed in the single peak Dalarna varieties today, from robust timing differences in the south to absence or only partial implementation of the tonal contrast in the north, strongly suggests that the accentual contrast has been spreading northwards through incremental peak delay in Accent 2 words. I argue that this situation mirrors the initial stages in the development that, through additional peak delay, eventually resulted in a double-peaked Accent 2 melody in central Scandinavia. At the same time, the older single peak patterns are still retained in Dalarna and scattered around the geographical margins of Norway and Sweden.*

This study addresses gender assignment in six North Scandinavian varieties with a three-gender system: Old Norse, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian. Focusing on gender variation and change, we investigate the role of various factors in gender change. Using the contemporary Swedish varieties Jamtlandic and Elfdalian as a basis, we compare gender assignment in other North Scandinavian languages, tracing the evolution back to Old Norse. The data consist of 1,300 concepts from all six languages coded for cognacy, gender, and morphological and semantic variation. Our statistical analysis shows that the most important factors in gender change are the Old Norse weak/strong inflection, Old Norse gender, animate/inanimate distinction, word frequency, and loan status. From Old Norse to modern languages, phonological assignment principles tend to weaken, due to the general loss of word-final endings. Feminine words are more susceptible to changing gender, and the tendency to lose the feminine is noticeable even in the varieties in our study upholding the three-gender system. Further, frequency is significantly correlated with unstable gender. In semantics, only the animate/inanimate distinction signifi-cantly predicts gender assignment and stability. In general, our study confirms the decay of the feminine gender in the Scandinavian branch of Germanic.

We describe the application of language technology methods and resources devised for Icelandic, a North Germanic language with about 300,000 speakers, in digital language resource creation for Faroese, a North Germanic language with about 50,000 speakers. The current project encompassed the development of a dedicated, high-accuracy part-of-speech (PoS) tagging solution for Faroese. To achieve this, a state-of-the-art neural PoS tagger for Icelandic, ABLTagger, was trained on a 100,000 word PoS-tagged corpus for Faroese, standardised with methods previously applied to Icelandic corpora. This tagger was supplemented with a novel Experimental Database of Faroese Inflection (EDFM), which is a lexicon containing morphological information on 67,488 Faroese words with about one million inflectional forms. This approach produced a PoS-tagging model for Faroese which achieves a 91.40% overall accuracy when evaluated with 10-fold cross validation, which is currently the highest accuracy for a dedicated Faroese PoS-tagger. The products of this project are made available for use in further research in Faroese language technology.

This article deals with some questions of legal language in the Nordic countries. It stresses the fact that, while there is no common legal language among these countries, there is still a strong common understanding even though each language (i.e., Danish, Norwegian and Swedish; Finnish is a different language) has also developed its own terminology. Nordic legal language has its roots in the first written form of the law in the years before and after 1200. Later, legal language was influenced by the German language, and, to some degree, more recently by English. The language of Nordic courts was always the vernacular. At the university, Latin was used until the eighteenth century (in dissertations still in the first part of the nineteenth century), but today studies of law are carried out in Nordic languages. There remains a great need for scholarly works on Nordic law in Nordic languages at a time when the balance between international orientation and the necessity of producing scholarly works in the national language is an issue to be discussed.

This work deals with identification of the three main Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) from spoken data. For this purpose, various state-of-the-art approaches are adopted, compared and combined, including i-vectors, deep neural networks (DNNs), bottleneck features (BTNs) as well as x-vectors. The best resulting approaches take advantage of multilingual BTNs and allow us to identify the target languages in speech segments lasting 5 s with a very low error rate around 1%. Therefore, they have many practical applications, such as in systems for transcription of Scandinavian TV and radio programs, where different persons speaking any of the target languages may occur. Within identification of Norwegian, we also focus on an unexplored sub-task of distinguishing between Bokmal and Nynorsk. Our results show that this problem is much harder to solve since these two language variants are acoustically very similar to each other: the best error rate achieved in this case is around 20%.

This paper documents the Dominant Language Constellations (DLC) in my personal multilingual repertoire, as it traces my path and pathos (or passion) of learning languages—starting with my mother tongue which has been a point of reference for most other languages that I have learnt during my life. It is also a sort of memoir of different periods in my life, inevitably linked to cultural and linguistic experiences, to formal and informal language education and self-access learning, as I was acquiring the languages that I speak today, and of the strategies I have used instinctively as a language learner—language learning strategies that served my purposes and worked for me. In providing a detailed account of when and how I enriched my linguistic repertoire, primarily with the five North Germanic or Nordic languages some of which are to a certain extent intercomprehensible, but also with other languages acutely different from the Germanic languages such as Lithuanian and Greek, I talk about how I felt or feel about each of these languages which have played different roles in my life, depending on a wide variety of factors, including place of residence, work, family, close friendships and social networks.

The two concepts of metal music and identity are often linked to each other, from the bands' and their audience's perspectives as well as in the academic field of metal studies (von Helden, 2017; Karki, 2015; Moberg, 2009a; Mustamo, 2016). One significant example of the interaction between metal and identity can be found in the Nordic scene. North-related themes and Nordic languages are used by metal bands in their music, visual representations, or narratives as components of their identity. Despite the increasing number of studies about Nordic metal scene and identity, the case of Nordic minorities seems to remain in the shade of major Nordic cultures. Willing to draw the attention on this shortcoming, this chapter will study the case of Finland's Swedish-speaking population. After a presentation of the groups analysed, the paper examines how the culture and language of Swedish-speaking Finns is represented through their works. This textual analysis will further discuss the particularity of being situated at the crossroads of Scandinavian and Finnish cultures and languages.

Among the numerous loanwords Saami has adopted from Proto-Norse there are also cases where the loan original has not been retained in modern or historically attested Nordic languages. Such etymologies can nevertheless be established on the basis of surviving cognate forms in other Germanic languages. Seven previously proposed etymologies of this kind are scrutinized, including those for North Saami duodji ‘handicraft’ and ráidalas ‘ladder’. Twelve new etymologies of the same type are argued for, among them explanations for the origin of North Saami ámadadju ‘face’, iktit ‘reveal, disclose’, and ivdni ‘color’.

This paper analyses the variation we find in the realization of finite clausal complements in the position of prepositional objects in a set of Germanic languages. The Germanic languages differ with respect to whether prepositions can directly select a clause (North Germanic) or not and instead need a prepositional proform (Continental West Germanic). Within the Continental West Germanic languages, we find further differences with respect to the constituent structures. We propose that German strong vs. weak prepositional proforms (e.g. drauf vs. darauf) differ with respect to their syntax, while this is not the case for the Dutch forms (ervan vs. daarvan). What the Germanic languages under consideration share is that the prepositional element can be covert, except in English. English shows only limited evidence for the presence of P with finite clauses in the position of prepositional objects generally, but only with a selected set of verbs. This investigation is a first step towards a broader study of the nature of clauses in prepositional object positions and the implications for the syntax of clausal complementation.

This paper discusses the structure of indirect question clauses in Danish. The construction is well-described in the literature, at least as far as the norm language is concerned. However, there is quite an amount of variation in certain syntactic contexts. Some of these have been touched upon in the literature, but not all. The interesting point concerning indirect question clauses in Danish is that their structure seems to be opaque even to language users normally associated with norm-obedience or even norm-setting. When clues like interpunctuation and vicarious subjects are considered, the structure of such sentences seems comparable to the structures of the other Mainland Scandinavian languages, Norwegian and Swedish.

Few European languages have in the course of their histories undergone as radical changes as English did in the medieval period. The earliest documented variety of the language, Old English (c. 450 to 1100 ce), was a synthetic language, typologically similar to modern German, with its three genders, relatively free word order, rich case system, and verbal morphology. By the beginning of the Middle English period (c. 1100 to 1500), changes that had begun a few centuries earlier in the Old English period had resulted in a remarkable typological shift from a synthetic language to an analytic language with fixed word order, very few inflections, and a heavy reliance on function words. System-internal pressures had a role to play in these changes, but arguably they were primarily due to intensive contacts with other languages, including Celtic languages, (British) Latin, Scandinavian languages, and a little later, French. As a result, English came to diverge from its Germanic sister languages, losing or reducing such Proto-Germanic features as grammatical gender; most inflections on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs; verb-second syntax; and certain types of reflexive marking. Among the external influences, long contacts with speakers of especially Brittonic Celtic languages (i.e., Welsh, Cornish, and Cumbrian) can be considered to have been of particular importance. Following the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from around 450 ce onward, there began an intensive and large-scale process of language shift on the part of the indigenous Celtic and British Latin speaking population in Britain. A general wisdom in contact linguistics is that in such circumstances—when the contact is intensive and the shifting population large enough—the acquired language (in this case English) undergoes moderate to heavy restructuring of its grammatical system, leading generally to simplification of its morphosyntax. In the history of English, this process was also greatly reinforced by the Viking invasions, which started in the late 8th century ce, and brought a large Scandinavian-speaking population to Britain. The resulting contacts between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings also contributed to the decrease of complexity of the Old English morphosyntax. In addition, the Scandinavian settlements of the Danelaw area left their permanent mark in place-names and dialect vocabulary in especially the eastern and northern parts of the country. In contrast to syntactic influences, which are typical of conditions of language shift, contacts that are less intensive and involve extensive bilingualism generally lead to lexical borrowing. This was the situation following the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 ce. It led to an influx of French loanwords into English, most of which have persisted in use up to the present day. It has been estimated that almost one third of the present-day English vocabulary is of French origin. By comparison, there is far less evidence of French influence on “core” English syntax. The earliest loanwords were superimposed by the French-speaking new nobility and pertained to administration, law, military terminology, and religion. Cultural prestige was the prime motivation for the later medieval borrowings.

This chapter considers whether the vowel-shifts of the various Germanic languages might have had a sociolinguistic aspect. Lass does well to remind us that discussion based solely on standard forms of English and German needs to be supplemented by consideration of regional variations, and his account of vowel-shifts in modern English and German dialects throws great light on the whole process. As Barbara Strang pointed out, the urbanisation of society plays a central role in language-development, but it is by no means clear that the diphthongisation of high vowels is a case in point. One notes, for example, that the evidence of Scandinavian languages points in the reverse direction, for there the diphthongisation of high vowels is found only in the dialects of rural areas and remote islands. The foregoing notes may appear disappointingly inconclusive, but the author concern is to point out some of the difficulties in the way of systematic generalisations about vowel-shifting.

A small piece of a tubular sheepbone (length: 6,5 cm, diameter: 2 cm) was found in 1961 during an archaeological excavation of the medieval town of Lund. The artefact is contextually dated to the second half of the eleventh century. The bone piece is provided with finely carved teeth and carries an inscription in runes. The identification of each rune character is uncomplicated. The inscription says: tinbl:bein. The second sequence bein represents the noun Rune Danish bæin, Old Danish bēn ‘bone’ in all probability with reference to the piece itself and it is plausible that the inscription forms a compound designating the utensil in question, but which utensil? The difficult task is to interpret tinbl? The first suggestion by the late runologist, Erik Moltke, related the runes to the noun Rune Danish tæinn, Old Danish tēn ‘spindle’ and alternatively, to the noun and verb Old Danish twinnæ ‘a twine/to twine’ suggesting the artefact being a utensil for twining threads together, i.e. a twining-bone. Erik Moltkes suggestions seem neither linguistically nor technically convincing. The bone piece was a unique find in 1961, but now a number of similar archaeological artefacts seem to constitute a whole group. In this article, I suggest that the sequence tinbl reflects the noun Old English timple known as a loan word in post-medieval Nordic languages. The present day English form is temple and the present day Danish form is tempel and the word designates an implement used in weaving. Consequently, the runic object must be a temple-bone (Old Danish *timpelbēn) an end-piece of a primitive medieval temple.

Im Anschluss an die zwei Jahre zuvor an der University of Bristol abgehaltene Konferenz zum Thema „Sprachpurismus“ (vgl. ZGL 31, 2003, 310-316) gingen auf Einladung von

Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically related languages diverge in systematic ways in diverse domains of the linguistic system. Its contributions set out to test this approach against new phenomena or data from synchronic, diachronic and, for the first time in a Sandwich-related volume, psycholinguistic perspectives. With topics ranging from nickname formation to the IPP (aka 'Ersatzinfinitiv'), from the grammaticalisation of the definite article to /s/-retraction, and from the role of verb-second order in the acquisition of L2 English to the psycholinguistics of gender, the volume appeals to students and specialists in modern and historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, translation studies, language pedagogy and cognitive science, providing a wealth of fresh insights into the relationships of German with its closest relatives while highlighting the potential inherent in the integration of different methodological traditions.

”Det ar sallan att jag dricker kaffe” : Om utbrytningskonstruktionen fran ett sydsvenskt perspektiv

The texts in this book are based on a selection of the paper presentations and Keynote lectures held during the Centre for Scandinavian Studies Copenhagen – Lund’s (CSS) second biannual international conference in the field of Scandinavian Studies. The conference took place in Lund, at the joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology of Lund University between May 16-18, 2019. This year’s theme was “Scandinavian Languages and Literatures Worldwide – Prospects and Challenges” and the central topics being researched and discussed were: Scandinavian Literature in the World Translations of Scandinavian Literature Scandinavian Children’s Literature in the World Linguistic and literary constructions of the North The Framing of Scandinavian Studies Worldwide Nordic Languages in the World / World Languages in the Nordic Countries The conference had three Keynote lectures: Sprak och psykologiskt lokalsinne, by Sigrid Combuchen (Author and former Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University) [see below] Region. Verden. Arkipelag – Nordisk litteratur og Tomas Transtromers “Ostersjoar”, by Dan Ringgaard (Professor at the School of Communication and Culture - Scandinavian Studies, Aarhus University) [see below] Beyond Noma, Bjork and Bergman – How the Nordic Countries could increase their Soft Power, by Francisco Beltran (Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto) Following long established international praxis in the field of Scandinavian Studies the texts are written in any of the Nordic languages or in English.