Journal articles on the topic 'Swedish; linguistics; dialects'

This paper initiates a series of publications on the morphology of the dialect of Staroshvedskoye (Sw. Gammalsvenskby), which is the only surviving Scandinavian dialect on the territory of the former Soviet Union. The village of Staroshvedskoye is located in the Kherson region, Ukraine. Its Swedish dialect historically belongs to the group of Swedish dialects of Estonia and goes back to the dialect of the island of Dagö (Hiiumaa). The dialect of Gammalsvenskby is of interest to slavists as an example of a language island in the Slavonic environment. From around the 1950s, the main spoken language of all village residents, including dialect speakers, has been surzhik. Due to the complete lack of studies of the present-day dialect and because of the severe endangerment in which the dialect is currently situated, the most urgent task is to collect, classify and publish the factual material. This paper introduces comprehensive material on nouns in the conservative variety of the present-day dialect. It lists all masculine nouns of type 1a together with their cognates from Estonian Swedish dialects; comments on the history of the forms are given as well. The sources for the material presented here are interviews with speakers of the conservative variety of the dialect recorded by the author during fieldwork in the village from 2004 to 2012. We plan to publish nouns of other types in later articles.

This paper initiates a series of publications on the morphology of the dialect of Staroshvedskoye (Sw. Gammalsvenskby), which is the only surviving Scandinavian dialect on the territory of the former Soviet Union. The village of Staroshvedskoye is located in the Kherson region, Ukraine. Its Swedish dialect historically belongs to the group of Swedish dialects of Estonia and goes back to the dialect of the island of Dagö (Hiiumaa). The dialect of Gammalsvenskby is of interest to slavists as an example of a language island in the Slavonic environment. From around the 1950s, the main spoken language of all village residents, including dialect speakers, has been surzhik. Due to the complete lack of studies of the present-day dialect and because of the severe endangerment in which the dialect is currently situated, the most urgent task is to collect, classify and publish the factual material. This paper introduces comprehensive material on nouns in the conservative variety of the present-day dialect. It lists all masculine nouns of type 1a together with their cognates from Estonian Swedish dialects; comments on the history of the forms are given as well. The sources for the material presented here are interviews with speakers of the conservative variety of the dialect recorded by the author during fieldwork in the village from 2004 to 2012. We plan to publish nouns of other types in later articles.

This paper initiates a series of publications on the morphology of the dialect of Staroshvedskoye (Sw. Gammalsvenskby), which is the only surviving Scandinavian dialect on the territory of the former Soviet Union. The village of Staroshvedskoye is located in the Kherson region, Ukraine. Its Swedish dialect historically belongs to the group of Swedish dialects of Estonia and goes back to the dialect of the island of Dagö (Hiiumaa). The dialect of Gammalsvenskby is of interest to slavists as an example of a language island in the Slavonic environment. From around the 1950s, the main spoken language of all village residents, including dialect speakers, has been surzhik. Due to the complete lack of studies of the present-day dialect and because of the severe endangerment in which the dialect is currently situated, the most urgent task is to collect, classify and publish the factual material. This paper introduces comprehensive material on nouns in the conservative variety of the present-day dialect. It lists all masculine nouns of type 1a together with their cognates from Estonian Swedish dialects; comments on the history of the forms are given as well. The sources for the material presented here are interviews with speakers of the conservative variety of the dialect recorded by the author during fieldwork in the village from 2004 to 2012. We plan to publish nouns of other types in later articles.

This paper continues the series of publications on the morphology of the dialect of Staroshvedskoye (Sw. Gammalsvenskby), which is the only surviving Scandinavian dialect in the territory of the former Soviet Union. The village of Staroshvedskoye is located in the Kherson region, Ukraine. Its Swedish dialect historically belongs to the group of Swedish dialects of Estonia and goes back to the dialect of the island of Dagö (Hiiumaa). The dialect of Gammalsvenskby is of interest to slavists as an example of a language island in the Slavonic environment. From around the 1950s, the main spoken language of all village residents, including dialect speakers, has been surzhik. Due to the complete lack of studies of the present-day dialect and because of the severe endangerment in which the dialect is currently situated, the most urgent task is to collect, classify, and publish the factual material. This paper introduces comprehensive material on nouns in the conservative variety of the present-day dialect. It lists all masculine nouns of types 1b, c, d, and e together with their cognates from Estonian Swedish dialects; comments on the history of the forms are given as well. The sources for the material presented here are interviews with speakers of the conservative variety of the dialect recorded by the author during fieldwork in the village from 2004 to 2013. We plan to publish nouns of other types in later articles.

The project Dialect Levelling in West Sweden focuses on the dialect situation in the first decade of the 21st century compared with the dialects spoken in the same region in the 1940s–1960s. Seventy teenagers participating in group interviews have been recorded and their use of phonological and morphological variables has been analysed. Comparisons with data recorded in the same region by The Institute of Language and Folklore in 1940–1960 show that dialect levelling is under way. It seems that the population of this area no longer speak a traditional dialect. An important issue, however, is how much the traditional dialects have actually changed, and to what extent the method for collecting data affects the answer. In the mid-20th century, the praxis within Swedish dialectology for selecting informants was to find as old and rural dialect speakers as possible to represent a specific region, and the purpose was that of documenting the dialect as a linguistic system. Today, however, many studies select informants based on speaker variables, because the aim is to document thedialect situation(i.e. who uses what linguistic variants when), rather than the traditional dialect as a linguistic system. Thus, there is a distinct difference between a linguistic interest and a sociolinguistic one. In this paper I suggest that it is critical when discussing dialect change to observe this very methodological change. In order to illustrate this, the use of dialect variants by two informants recorded in 1948 is compared with the use of dialect variants by three informants recorded in 2007 and 2008. The informants are all from around a small rural village located approximately 70 km from Gothenburg in West Sweden. This is an area where a specific variety of West Swedish has been spoken. By comparing these individuals, the concept of dialect change is problematized.

AbstractIn 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.

Current analyses of the semantic structure of the ditransitive construction in English assume that the construction consists of approximately nine semantic subconstructions, namely those of actual, intended, retained and metaphorical transfer (and some corresponding subconstructions). An examination of the ditransitive construction in Icelandic reveals at least seventeen subconstructions in that language. In addition to most of the subconstructions found in English, the ones in Icelandic also denote transfer along a path, possession, utilizing, enabling, hindrance, constraining and mental activities. An investigation of the ditransitive construction in the most archaic Swedish and Norwegian dialects reveals a significant overlap with Icelandic, but also some overlap with English and German. This comparative evidence permits a reconstruction of the semantic structure of the ditransitive construction common to the Germanic language area.

The paper describes and discusses a demonstrative that has received little attention in the literature. The demonstrative can be found in many of the Scandinavian languages and dialects, and seems to be most frequent and widespread in the mainland Scandinavian languages. It has the same phonological form as third-person singular pronouns, and can be used only with nouns and have human (or human-like) specific reference. From a deictic perspective, the demonstrative is interesting because its conditions of use are linked to what I call psychological distance. Syntactically, it is also interesting because it has different characteristics in the different languages; in Norwegian and Icelandic it can be argued to be part of the DP, while the empirical facts of Swedish and Danish suggest that the psychologically distal demonstrative is DP-external in these languages.

Scottish Gaelic displays a phonological contrast that is realised in different dialects by means of tonal accent, glottalisation or overlength. In line with existing analyses of similar oppositions in languages such as Swedish, Danish, Franconian and Estonian, I show that this contrast reflects a difference in metrical structure. Using the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory, I argue that this metrical contrast is derived, and results from faithfulness to foot structure that is built regularly at the stem level, but rendered opaque by subsequent phonological processes. Scottish Gaelic therefore represents an intermediate stage in the diachronic development of underlyingly contrastive metrical structure. This analysis successfully accounts for the complex properties of svarabhakti, a process of copy epenthesis that is intimately connected to the phonological contrast in question, and also sheds light upon the relationship between the oppositions of tonal accent, glottalisation and overlength found in various languages of northern Europe.

SUMMARY This article presents a hypothesis about the origin of tone accent in Swedish and Norwegian. The main idea is that the presence of Proto-Nordic secondary stress and its subsequent reduction is essential to the development of accent 2. Developing an earlier proposal (Riad 1988), it is argued that stress clash is critical in the phonologization of tonal information. Support for the major claims is provided by the correlation of Proto-Nordic secondary stress and accent 2 in the modern languages, the synchronic behaviour of accent 2 in Modern Standard Swedish, its manifestation in conservative dialects, and distributional differences between three Scandinavian varieties, which reflect different stages of development. Other, earlier theories of the origin of the accents are discussed in the appendix. RÉSUMÉ Cet article présente une hypothèse de l'origine des accents tonaux en suédois et en norvégien. L'idée principale est que la présence de l'accent dynamique secondaire en proto-nordique et sa réduction subséquente sont essentielles pour le développement de l'accent 2. Ici l'auteur développe la proposition de Riad (1988) selon laquelle le facteur qui cause la phonologisation d'information tonale est le 'stress clash' (le conflit de l'accent tonique). À l'appui des aspects principaux de l'hypothèse il y a la corrélation entre l'accent dynamique secondaire en proto-nordique et l'accent 2 (tonal) dans les langues modernes, la comportement synchronique d'accent 2 en suédois moderne, sa manifestation dans les dialectes conservateurs, et des différences distribu-tionelles entre trois dialectes Scandinaves, qui présentent les différents étapes du développement. On discute d'autres théories de l'origine des accents dans un appendice. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG In diesem Aufsatz wird eine Hypothèse zur ÖEntstehung der schwedischen und norwegischen tonalen Akzente vorgelegt. Ihr Kernpunkt ist, daß sekun-dare Betonungen im Urnordischen und ihre spätere Reduktion eng mit der Ent-wicklung des Akzents 2 verbunden sind. Als auslösenden Faktor in der Pho-nologisierung tonaler Information wird hier ein sog. 'Stress Clash' (nach Riad 1988) angenommen. Stütze für die hauptsächlichen Aspekte dieser Hypothèse finden wir in der Korrelation zwischen urnordischer sekundärer Betonung und Akzent 2 in den modernen Sprachen, dem synchronischen Verhalten des Ak-zent 2 im modernen Standardschwedischen, ihrer Manifestation in konserva-tiven Dialekten und auch in den distributionellen Kontrasten in drei skandi-navischen Varietäten, denen verschiedene Stadien der Entwicklung des Tons entsprechen. Andere Theorien zum Ursprung der Akzente werden in einem Anhang diskutiert.

AbstractPrevious investigations of inter-Scandinavian intelligibility have shown that, in general, Norwegians are better at understanding the closely related languages Danish and Swedish than Danes and Swedes are at understanding Norwegian. This asymmetry is often explained by the strong position that dialects hold in Norway as opposed to in Denmark and Sweden. In Norway, the general public is more exposed to language variation than in Sweden and Denmark. Due to this exposure Norwegians are assumed to have higher language awareness and more possibilities for linguistic transfer than Swedes and Danes. This could make it easier for them to understand closely related language varieties. The aim of the present investigation is to get an answer to the question whether Norwegians are better at understanding Nordic varieties relative to linguistic distances than Danes. If it is indeed the case that Norwegians have more language awareness, we would expect them to be better than Danes at understanding varieties with the same linguistic distance to their native variety. Our results show that Norwegians are generally better at understanding Nordic language varieties than Danes are. However, this can be explained by linguistic distances and knowledge of the language varieties in the test. No evidence was found for more general language awareness among Norwegians than among Danes.

In this study 91 local Swedish dialects were analysed based on vowel pronunciation. Acoustic measurements of vowel quality were made for 18 vowels of 1,014 speakers by means of principal component analysis of vowel spectra. Two principal components were extracted explaining more than [Formula: see text] of the total variance in the vowel spectra. Plotting vowels in the PC1-PC2 plane showed a solution with strong resemblance to vowels in a formant plane. Per location averages of all speakers were calculated and factor analysis was run with the 91 locations as data cases and the two acoustic component of the 18 words as variables. Nine factors were extracted corresponding to distinct geographic distribution patterns. The factor scores of the analysis revealed co-occurrence of a number of linguistic features.

This paper reports on field work conducted during 1994 in Västra Nyland (Finland) in order to obtain independent and current documentation of the incongruent case forms in the dialect, as reported by Lundström (1939). The data collected substantiated the existence of incongruent case forms in the dialect, but the actual use of such forms could not be traced any longer. Due to this, several details in the actual use of certain incongruency types could not be clarified. The loss of case incongruency in this dialect area raises the question of how a vernacular can change such a grammatical feature. According to Emonds (1986), such losses cannot be remedied, but this is exactly the case here. The changing status of a modern Scandinavian dialect seems to be the only way to explain this change.

Abstract Tracing the diffusion of linguistic innovations in space from historical sources is challenging. The complexity of the datasets needed in combination with the noisy reality of historical language data mean that it has not been practical until recently. However, bigger historical corpora with richer spatial and temporal information allow us to attempt it. This paper presents an investigation into changes affecting first person non-singular pronouns in the history of Norwegian: first, individual changes affecting the dual (vit > mit) and plural (vér > mér), followed by loss of the dual-plural distinction by merger into either form or replacement of both by Danish-Swedish vi. To create dynamic spatial visualisations of these changes, the use of kernel density estimation is proposed. This term covers a range of statistical tools depending on the kernel function. The paper argues for a Gaussian kernel in time and an adaptive uniform (k-nearest neighbours) kernel in space, allowing uncertainty or multiple localisation to be incorporated into calculations. The results for this dataset allow us to make a link between Modern Norwegian dialectological patterns and language use in the Middle Ages; they also exemplify different types of diffusion process in the spread of linguistic innovations.

AbstractContinuity and Change in Present-Day Swedish: Eskilstuna Revisited is a large-scale study of language change in real time. In this article, the focus is on the results of a trend study and the analysis of how extralinguistic and linguistic factors influence how language varies and changes.The empirical material consists of informal conversationlike interviews, in which seven morphological and morphophonological variables have been analyzed in terms of the traditional extralinguistic factors of social group, gender, and age, as well as in terms of social networks. These morpho(phono)logical variables are sociolinguistically marked and have been hypothesized to show a process of more or less rapid change from regional dialect toward spoken standard. The rate of change at the level of the community has been slow, however. Comparisons between the influence of extralinguistic and linguistic factors indicate that social forces are more influential than linguistic ones.

Abstract This study examines the Swedish user-generated web dictionary Folkmun.se, encompassing roughly 5,000 entries. Initially a general overview of the website is presented, followed by an analysis of how the content of Folkmun.se has developed, with particular focus on 190 usernames. The contributors can be grouped together based on two distinct factors: 1) by number of contributions, and 2) by the kind of words they prefer to submit. One conclusion of this study is that a great majority of contributors only publish one or two entries. This entails that a large number of users have contributed to the dictionary. Furthermore, a majority chooses to focus on dialect words or slang words. Many of these entries are not represented in traditional Swedish dictionaries. The advantages of having people of different backgrounds and skills working with word collections are obvious, and their work is an important, albeit often neglected, contribution to general linguistics.

ABSTRACTThe development of language conditions in Helsinki makes it possible to observe many processes of sociolinguistic interest. By European standards, the beginning itself is exceptional. Helsinki was originally founded in the middle of a Swedish-speaking area, which means that it lacked all natural connections with any basis of Finnish dialect from which urban colloquial language and standard spoken Finnish might have emerged. However, throughout the 20th century Helsinki has been the most important Finnish-speaking city, and its colloquial Finnish has served as a model for the evolution of colloquial Finnish throughout the country. One may well wonder how colloquial Helsinki Finnish came into existence in the course of only a few decades and consolidated its position as the model for everyday Finnish.

The paper presents research findings with 56 Roma children from Macedonia and Serbia between the ages of 3-6 years. The children’s knowledge of Romani as their mother tongue was assessed with a specially designed test. The test measures the children’s comprehension and production of different types of grammatical knowledge such as wh–questions, wh-complements, passive verbs, possessives, tense, aspect, the ability of the children to learn new nouns and new adjectives, and repetition of sentences. In addition, two pictured narratives about Theory of Mind were given to the children. The hypothesis of the authors was that knowledge of the complex grammatical categories by children will help them to understand better the Theory of Mind stories. The results show that Roma children by the age of 5 know most of the grammatical categories in their mother tongue and most of them understand Theory of Mind. References Bakalar, P. (2004). The IQ of Gypsies in Central Europe. 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Atlas of the Baltic Languages: Plant Names of Slavonic OriginThe article investigates Slavonic-derived plant names in dialects of the two surviving Baltic languages – Latvian and Lithuanian. Historically, these Slavonisms were originally adopted by small-scale regional dialects, which are now disappearing. In 2009, a pilot study for the Atlas of the Baltic Languages was published. It comprised 12 geo-linguistic maps with Latvian, Lithuanian and English commentaries. 2012 saw the publication, in CD format, of the Atlas’s first volume: Lexis 1: Flora. The material analysed concerns names for: (1) wild plants, e.g., cornflower, nettle, waybread, milfoil, dandelion, plantain; (2) cultivated plants, e.g., onion, potatoe, garlic, cucumber, Swedish turnip, [winter] wheat; (3) trees (juniper, hazel-tree, pear-tree, plum-tree, cherry-tree, etc.) and words related to a tree (top of the tree, cone, etc.).Borrowed plant names can generally be grouped as follows: 1. Common borrowings located in a wide area in Lithuania and used all over Eastern part of Latvia – the region of Latgale. These usually denote fruits and vegetables, e.g. the potatoe (Solanum tuberosum) – Latv. buļve and its variants, buļba and variants, uļbiks / Lith. bulvė and variants, bulbė and variants; or garlic – casnags, casnāgs and variants / Lith. česnākas, šešnākas and variants. 2. Common borrowings located in wide area in Lithuania and used in some subdialects in Latgale, e.g. Lith. vosilka / Lat. Vasilka ‘cornflower (Centaurea cyanus)’; Lith. kriváunykas and variants / Lat. kravavņiks and variants ‘yarrow (Achillea millefolium L.)’. 3. Slavonisms whose origin differs in Latvian and in Lithuanian, e.g. Lat. klevers (< Russ. клевер, Bel. dialectal клéвер, клевiр / Lith. kaniušina < Bel. канюшына, Pol. koniczyna for ‘clover (Trifolium)’.The Atlas of the Baltic Languages, reflecting the language contacts, could be an important source for further investigation not only in Baltistics but also in Slavistics and Indo-European comparative linguistics.Атлас балтийских языков: названия растений славянского происхожденияВ статье рассматриваются названия растений славянского происхождения в диалектах единственнo живых балтийских языков – латышского и литовского. Исторически эти славянизмы были заимствованы региональными территориальными диалектами, которые в настоящее время исчезают. В 2009 г. был опубликован пилотный проект Атласа балтийских языков, включающий 12 геолингвистических карт с комментариями на латышском, литовском и английском языках. В 2012 г. первый том атласа: Атлас балтийских языков. Лексика I: Флора – был опубликован в формате CD. Связанную с растительним миром лексику представляют названия, обозначающие: 1) дикорастущие растения – например, василек, крапиву, подорожник, тысячелистник, одуванчик, 2) культурные растения – например, лук, картофель, репу, (зимнюю) пшеницу, и 3) деревья (можжевельник, орешник, грушу и др.), а также части деревьев (макушку дерева, шишку). В качестве основных групп заимствованных названий растений можно выделить: 1. Общие заимствования, которые встречаются в широком ареале в Литве и во всей восточной части Латвии – в Латгалии. Обычно это названия овощей и фруктов, например, картофеля (Solanum tuberosum) – лат. buļve и вар., buļba и вар., uļbiks / лит. bulve и вар., bulbe и вар., чеснока: лат. casnags, casnāgs и вар./ лит. česnākas, šešnākas и вар. 2. Общие заимствования, которые встречаются в широком ареале в Литве и в некоторых говорах Латгалии, например, лит. vosilka / лат. vasilka ‘вaсилёк (Centaurea cyanus)’, лит. kriváunykas и вар. / лат. kravavņiks и вар. ‘тысячелистник (Achillea millefolium L.)’. 3. Славянизмы несовпадающего проиcхождения в латышском и литовском языках, например, лат. klevers (< рус. kлевер, бел. диал. клéвер, клевiр) / лит. kaniušina < бел. kанюшына, поль. koniczyna ‘клевер (Trifolium)’. Атлас балтийских языков отражает языковые контакты и служит важным источником для дальнейших исследований не только в балтистике, но также в славистикe и индоевропейском сравнительном языкознании.

Abstract While the Swedish negator inte may be doubled in a final clause-external position, in both standard Swedish and dialects, many dialects also allow a final, clause-internal particle (e, i or ai) in negated clauses. FNPs occur in a coherent area around the Baltic Sea, and in contrast with doubling negation, they are possible both after both inte and aldrig ‘never’. FNPs are also used in questions and exclamations, contexts that disallow doubling negation. These particles may have developed from the former Swedish negator ej or from the common inte. An argument for the former alternative is that other dialectal phenomena that spread from central Sweden during the late Middle Ages have approximately the same geographic distribution. In the final section of the paper, some typological consequences and implications are discussed. Furthermore, it is argued that syntactic studies of non-standard varieties may reveal new insights of typological relevance.

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan keskipohjalaisten ja pohjoispohjalaisten eli Oulun seudun murteiden rajaa. Kettusen murrekartastosta on poimittu kahdeksan piirrettä, jotka erottavat näitä murteita toisistaan. Näitä piirteitä ovat esimerkiksi t:n heikon asteen vastineet ja yksikön 3. persoonan päätteet. Nämä samat piirteet ovat myös itä- ja länsimurteita erottavia piirteitä siten, että keskipohjalaiset variantit ovat läntisiä ja pohjoispohjalaiset itäisiä. Analyysi pohjautuu pääosin Muoto-opin arkiston kokoelmiin. Murreanalyysin tulos on, että kaikki tähänastiset rajanvedot keski- ja pohjoispohjalaisten murteiden välillä ovat olleet liian pohjoisia. Murreraja on toki häilyvä, mutta pohjoispohjalaiset (ja itäiset) variantit ovat vallalla jo heti Pyhäjoella tai sen pohjoispuolella. Artikkelissa palataan myös siihen Kettusen esittämään argumenttiin, että puheena olevien murteiden raja on Pattijoessa, koska se on ollut Pähkinäsaaren rauhan (1323) rajalinja. Tässä Kettunen nojaa historiantutkija Jalmari Jaakkolan näkemykseen. Muissa tutkimuksissa rajaksi on tulkittu Pyhäjoki tai Petäjäisoja. Murreanalyysi tukee vahvasti Pyhäjoen tulkintaa rajajoeksi, varsinkinkin kun historiantutkimuksessa Pyhäjoen voidaan todeta olleen itä- ja länsisuomalaisen asutuksen välinen intressiraja. Viimeaikaisen tutkimuksen mukaan samoille alueille sijoittuu myös geneettinen raja. River Pyhäjoki – an old dialect boundary and a state border? This article discusses the boundary between the Central and Northern Ostrobothnian (Oulu region) dialects. The focus is on eight dialectal features (taken from Kettunen’s classic dialect map) that separate these dialects. These features include the weak-grade equivalents of t and the endings of 3rd-person singular verb forms. These features are also deemed to separate the eastern and western dialects of Finnish so that the Central Ostrobothnian variants represent the western dialect type and the Northern Ostrobothnian variants represent the eastern type. The present findings are based primarily on the materials of the Finnish Morphological Archive. The results suggest that all former borderlines between the Central and Northern Ostrobothnian dialects were drawn too far to the north. Naturally, the dialect boundary is rather fluid, but most of the Northern Ostrobothnian (and eastern) variants are already represented in the river valley around Pyhäjoki or in the parishes immediately to the north. In addition, the article re-examines Kettunen’s definition of this dialect boundary. Kettunen claims that the boundary runs along the Pattijoki valley, and in his estimation this reflects the borderline of the Pähkinäsaari Treaty (1323), the first treaty between the Swedish Kingdom and Novgorod. Here he cites the views of historian Jalmari Jaakkola. Some historians have subsequently suggested that the borderline ran along either the Pyhäjoki or Petäjäisoja rivers. Dialectological analysis strongly supports the interpretation of Pyhäjoki’s being the border, especially because historians have already proved that Pyhäjoki was once the northernmost border of the western Finnish settlement. According to recent research, it seems that Pyhäjoki represents a genetic border too.

Despite decades of research, debate continues over the analysis of Object Shift in Mainland Scandinavian, and all syntactic and information-structural accounts have run into empirical and/or conceptual problems. We argue that this debate can be resolved by recognizing that Object Shift is, in fact, a prosodic phenomenon. Our analysis builds on the observation that varieties with optional Object Shift (most Swedish dialects, South Danish dialects (e.g., Ærø)) also have a tone accent contrast. The in-situ word order in these varieties is licensed because tonal accent creates a prosodic domain that makes the incorporation of weak pronouns possible.

In this paper an aggregate analysis of vowel pronunciation in Swedish dialects is proposed by means of multidimensional scaling (MDS). The Gap statistic showed that no statistically significant partitioning of Swedish dialects can be made based on vowel pronunciation, which means that the dialects form a true linguistic continuum. Vowels recorded by 1,170 speakers at 98 sites were analyzed acoustically with principal components of Bark-filtered spectra, and the linguistic distances between varieties were computed as the Euclidean distance of the acoustic variables. The MDS analyses showed that the dialect areas that can be detected based on vowel pronunciation in modern rural varieties of Swedish largely correspond to the traditional Swedish dialect division and divisions of regional varieties of Standard Swedish. The results also show a large-scale ongoing dialect leveling. The change is largest in many central parts of the language area close to the biggest cities, while the dialects in more peripheral areas are relatively stable.

Abstract Swedish makes use of tonal accents (Accents 1 and 2) to contrast words, but the functional load is very low, with some regional dialects not even exhibiting the contrast. In particular given the low number of minimal pairs, the question is whether tonal word accent is used in lexical access. Here we present two cross-modal fragment semantic priming studies in order to address this question. Both experiments use first syllable fragments in order to prime semantically related targets. Experiment 1 utilises words whose first syllable occurs with both accent patterns, creating a situation in which there is lexical competition between words that differ solely in terms of accent. Experiment 2 removes this competition by using words that have no such accent competitors. Our results show that native speakers of Swedish use tonal word accent in lexical access: Accent mispronunciations failed to prime semantically related targets, regardless of whether primes had accent competitors or not. Results for a group of early bilingual speakers (who grew up with one Swedish-speaking parent and one other non-tonal language) showed no differences in processing compared to the monolinguals. This indicates that the extraction of accent features during acquisition and their use in lexical access is robust, even in a scenario where multiple input languages lead to tonal word accent being a useful feature for only some of the lexical items that are being acquired. There is no doubt that the accent system is well entrenched into the bilinguals’ phonological system.

This article analyzes the representation of linguistic variation in the Finnish translations of four Swedish coming-of-age stories depicting migrant or minority perspectives: Mikael Niemi’s 2000 Popular Music from Vittula, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s 2003 Ett öga rött, Marjaneh Bakhtiari’s 2005 Kalla det vad fan du vill, and Susanna Alakoski’s 2006 Svinalängorna. Through an analysis of speech and thought representation techniques and focalization, the article explores the role played by literature and translation in the materialization of dialects and sociolects as bounded entities. The paper argues that linguistic and social hybridity, on which the reception of minority and migrant literatures often focuses, is accompanied by the reification of new varieties conceived as authentic expressions of migrant and minority experience. Literature and translation are active agents in such processes, which are largely based on cultural, discursive, and cognitive constraints that condition the interpretation of each text.

This article analyzes the representation of linguistic variation in the Finnish translations of four Swedish coming-of-age stories depicting migrant or minority perspectives: Mikael Niemi’s 2000 Popular Music from Vittula, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s 2003 Ett öga rött, Marjaneh Bakhtiari’s 2005 Kalla det vad fan du vill, and Susanna Alakoski’s 2006 Svinalängorna. Through an analysis of speech and thought representation techniques and focalization, the article explores the role played by literature and translation in the materialization of dialects and sociolects as bounded entities. The paper argues that linguistic and social hybridity, on which the reception of minority and migrant literatures often focuses, is accompanied by the reification of new varieties conceived as authentic expressions of migrant and minority experience. Literature and translation are active agents in such processes, which are largely based on cultural, discursive, and cognitive constraints that condition the interpretation of each text.

T. Alexopoulou & D. Kolliakou: On linkhood, topicalization and clitic left dislocationF. Cornish: ‘Downstream’ effects on the predicate in a Functional Grammar clause derivationN. Duffield, L. White, J. Bruhn de Garavito, S. Montrul & P. Prévost: Clitic placement in L2 French: evidence from sentence matchingN. Sobin: The Comp-trace effect, the adverb effect and minimal CPA. Spencer: Gender as an inflectional categoryI. Toivonen: A directed motion construction in SwedishN. Whitman: A categorial treatment to bare-NP adverbsZ. Bao: Review article on MATTHEW Y. CHEN, Tone sandhi: patterns across Chinese dialectsA. Carnie & N. Mendoza-Denton: Functional is/n't formalism: an interactive review of Darnell et al. (1999) (M. DARNELL, E. MORAVCSIK, F. J. NEWMEYER, M. NOONAN & K. WHEATLEY (eds.), Functionalism and formalism in linguistics, vol. I: General papers & vol. II: Case studiesR. Freidin: Remarks on basic syntax. Review article on P. CULICOVER, Principles and parameters: an introduction to syntactic theory; J. MCCAWLEY, The syntactic phenomena of English; A. RADFORD, Syntactic theory and the structure of English: a Minimalist approach; and I. ROBERTS, Comparative syntaxT. Langendoen: Review article on M. ARONOFF & J. REES-MILLER, The handbook of linguisticsS. S. Mufwene: Colonization, globalization and the plight of ‘weak’ languages: a rejoinder to Nettle & Romaine's Vanishing voices. Review article on D. NETTLE & S. ROMAINE, Vanishing voices: the extinction of the world's languages

Theodora Alexopoulou & Dimitra Kolliakou: On linkhood, topicalization and clitic left dislocationFrancis Cornish: ‘Downstream’ effects on the predicate in a Functional Grammar clause derivationAndrew Spencer: Gender as an inflectional categoryIda Toivonen: A directed motion construction in SwedishZ. Bao: Review article on MATTHEW Y. CHEN, Tone sandhi: patterns across Chinese dialectsR. Freidin: Remarks on basic syntax. Review article on P. CULICOVER, Principles and parameters: an introduction to syntactic theory; J. MCCAWLEY, The syntactic phenomena of English; A. RADFORD, Syntactic theory and the structure of English: a Minimalist approach; and I. ROBERTS, Comparative syntaxT. Langendoen: Review article on M. ARONOFF & J. REES-MILLER, The handbook of linguisticsS. S. Mufwene: Colonization, globalization and the plight of ‘weak’ languages: a rejoinder to Nettle & Romaine’s Vanishing voices. Review article on D. NETTLE & S. ROMAINE, Vanishing voices : the extinction of the world’s languages