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Aims and objectives: This study examines fennicisms (i.e., Finnish loanwords and calques) in Finland-Swedish, a Swedish variety spoken in Finland. We investigate how fennicism frequency relates to speakers' regional backgrounds and fluency in Finnish. Methodology: 134 participants from four regions in Finland performed a picture-naming task designed to elicit fennicisms. The participants also rated their own fluency in Finnish. Data and analysis: A regression analysis with the outcome variable of fennicism frequency and the predictors of region, fluency in Finnish, and gender was performed. Findings: Results show that speakers from the more bilingual regions of Southern Finland and Helsinki used significantly more fennicisms than speakers from Ostrobothnia or Swedish-speaking Åland. The study suggests that fluency in Finnish was a strong predictor for fennicism use, as speakers with low or moderate knowledge of Finnish used fewer fennicisms than speakers with high or native(-like) fluency. No significant effect of gender was found. Originality: While fennicisms are considered widespread in Finland-Swedish, there is little previous research on their use and distribution. Implications: The results demonstrate that while many of the fennicisms are well-established in the Finland-Swedish variety, their use is limited to certain groups and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psycholinguistic studies using the event‐related brain potential (ERP) technique have found both N400 and P600 effects for gender stereotype violations. The finding of a P600 effect for this type of world knowledge violation is surprizing given that this component is traditionally associated with syntactic violations. In this paper, we set out to systematically analyse design‐ and task patterns of ERP studies investigating gender stereotype violations. Based on our review, we propose a scheme that predicts a P600 effect for gender stereotype violations for stimuli comprising entire sentences, and specifically when the gender stereotype serves to establish coherence in inferences (i.e., expecting a specific referent gender or a stereotype‐appropriate behaviour of the sentence subject based on the gender stereotype information). We predict an N400 effect for gender stereotype information that does not serve to establish coherence in inferences, as well as in priming paradigms. By extension, our predictive scheme suggests that the N400 may reflect a hybrid process of semantic retrieval and integration, while the P600 may reflect a cognitive process of error monitoring, and mental revision. Our study can aid in the interpretation of previous findings and inform future studies investigating gender stereotyping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans from the same 16 countries where the test languages are spoken. Next, we present the data from a sub-group of listeners who had not learned the test language and had had minimal exposure to it. This allows us to investigate how well the listeners understand the test language on the basis of structural similarities between their own language and the test languages. Finally, we compare the results of the two data sets to the traditional genealogic characterisation of the three language groups. We expect the intelligibility results from the second group of listeners who had had minimal exposure to the test language to be a better reflection of the genealogical characterisation than the results from the larger group who had sometimes been exposed to the test language or had learned it at school.

This study examines the use of and attitudes towards finlandisms and fennicisms in Finland Swedish. Finlandisms are words or structures typical of the Swedish variety spoken in Finland, while fennicisms are a category of finlandisms for which the source language is Finnish. Fennicisms are often discussed in context of Finnish influence and consequent Finland Swedish language loss, suggesting that the use of these features in Swedish is stigmatised. The study analyses survey responses from 126 Finland Swedish individuals in order to investigate the use of and perceptions regarding fennicisms. The responses indicate that although finlandisms and, in particular, fennicisms are often seen as erroneous, they can also be used to indicate a uniquely Finland Swedish linguistic identity. Additionally, responses regarding fennicisms provide examples of previously overlooked Finnish loanwords, while also indicating that loanwords with origins in other languages are often misidentified as stemming from Finnish. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been reported that speakers of Danish understand more Swedish than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than vice versa. We hypothesise that literate speakers of Danish use their orthographic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. To test this hypothesis, first-language (L1) Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited to study the online brain responses during decoding operations. Results showed that ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was inconsistent with the Danish spelling were significantly more negative-going than ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was consistent with the Danish spelling between 750 ms and 900 ms after stimulus onset. Together with higher word-recognition scores for consistent items, our data provide strong evidence that online activation of L1 orthography enhances word recognition of spoken Swedish in literate speakers of Danish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are some languages universally seen as beautiful? And if so, what are the linguistic traits that make some languages sound more pleasing than others? This paper addresses these two questions. We do so with results from two listener experiments that use speech samples from a bilingual Danish–Swedish speaker in a matched guise test, where the listeners are 'previously unexposed' students from central China. Our results indicate that listeners from Central China with no previous exposure find Swedish more pleasing sounding than Danish. This finding provides evidence that there could be features of language that sound more beautiful to listeners cross-culturally. In a follow-up experiment we remove the intonation contours of the speech to see whether this prosodic trait plays a role for evaluations. The results show that the difference in evaluations between Swedish and Danish disappears when both speech samples are monotonised. We discuss the importance of our findings for language attitudes research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present two new measures of syntactic distance between languages. First, we present the 'movement measure' which measures the average number of words that has moved in sentences of one language compared to the corresponding sentences in another language. Secondly, we introduce the 'indel measure' which measures the average number of words being inserted or deleted in sentences of one language compared to the corresponding sentences in another language. The two measures were compared to the 'trigram measure' which was introduced by Nerbonne & Wiersma (2006, A Measure of Aggregate Syntactic Distance. In Nerbonne, J. and Hinrichs, E. (eds.) Linguistic Distances Workshop at the joint conference of International Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney, July, 2006, pp. 82-90.). We correlated the results of the three measures and found a low correlation between the results of the movement and indel measure, indicating that the two measures represent different kinds of linguistic variation. We found a high correlation between the results of the movement measure and the trigram measure. The results of all of the three measures suggest that English is syntactically a Scandinavian language. Because of our unique database design we were able to detect asymmetric relationships between the languages. All three measures suggest that asymmetric syntactical distances could be part of the explanation why native speakers of Dutch more easily understand German texts than native speakers of German understand Dutch texts (Swarte 2016). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]