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.

Normative ratings are a means to control for the effects of confounding variables in psycholinguistic experiments. This paper introduces a new dataset of normative ratings for Swedish encompassing 111 concrete nouns and the corresponding picture stimuli in the MultiPic database (Duñabeitia et al. 2017). The norms for name agreement, category typicality, age of acquisition and subjective frequency were collected using online surveys among native speakers of the Finland-Swedish variety of Swedish. The paper discusses the inter-correlations between these variables and compares them against available ratings for other languages. In doing so, the paper argues that ratings for age of acquisition and subjective frequency collected for other languages may be applied to psycholinguistic studies on Finland-Swedish, at least with respect to concrete and highly imageable nouns. In contrast, norms for name agreement should be collected from speakers of the same language variety as represented by the subjects in the actual experiments.

In the article, the development of the Tver’ Karelian dialect is discussed. This new dialect has emerged from a mix of regional dialects of Karelian immigrants from the seventeenth century onwards. Characteristics of a new dialect in Tver’ Karelian are examined on the basis of demographic data and linguistic descriptions. In addition, the unity and internal variation of Tver’ Karelian as well as its relation to other Karelian dialects are taken into consideration. In regard to this kind of comparative study, the article reveals some significant regional shortcomings in the linguistic research material available. A discrepancy could also be found between the areal distribution of certain linguistic features of Tver’ Karelian and the main region of origin indicated by historical documents.

This article provides an overview of the Russian origin of Karelian cow names. It explores what the Russian-origin names mean, what the most common principles of naming are, and whether Russian names have Karelian equivalents. Attention is also paid to the spatial and temporal variation of the names. The data were collected in the 2010s by means of interviews. The data are compared with the name data recorded in the Dictionary of Karelian (KKS). The KKS data reveal extensive adaptation to the Karelian language, whereas in the interview data there is less adaptation to Karelian and the names are often thoroughly Russian. In the KKS data the most common principle of naming is the time of birth, and names based on colouration are also common. According to both data sets, the principles of naming have remained relatively consistent, and the data reveal no great spatial differences in the occurrence of names.

Most modern studies of Swedish phonology take the view that the underlying vowel inventory of Central Standard Swedish comprises nine, rather than seventeen or eighteen, mutually contrasting vowel phonemes. A residual problem of a classic phonological type concerns the borrowed entities, rendered in traditional Swedish orthography as au and eu, whose ‘status in the vowel system is unclear’ (Riad 2014:42). The present paper scrutinizes earlier and current phonological interpretations of these entities, adduces evidence for and against each proposal, and concludes that the case for treating them as phonemic diphthongs /V͡V/, as /VC/-sequences, or as monosyllabic /VV̯/-sequences is weak and that they should in the first place be viewed as underlying heterosyllabic vowel sequences /VV/, subject to a special phonological stipulation valid for a borrowed sub-domain of the lexicon. Typologically, Central Standard Swedish should continue to be subsumed under the category of languages that lack phonological diphthongs.

The last three decades have witnessed increasing interest in discourse-pragmatic markers (DPMs), both with regards to their high frequency in spoken discourse and their multifunctionality in interaction. Most studies have centered on English, with studies on Danish restricted to a handful of previous interactional discourse analyses. This paper is a preliminary investigation of the Danish word sådan (commonly glossed as ‘such’ or ‘like this/that’). A qualitative, form-based, discourse analytic approach is undertaken on over 40 minutes of naturally occurring Danish talk to argue that sådan qualifies as a DPM. In service of textual, subjective, and intersubjective macro-functions, sådan illustrates; exemplifies; marks hesitation; approximates a quantity; mitigates, hedges, or softens; and allows self-correction or self-repair. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for sådan’s place in the Danish DPM system and our understanding of DPMs across languages.

Despite many attempts, we do not yet know how to answer the question exhaustively and adequately: What is common Danish stød phonetically? Specifically, is there an underlying physiological constancy behind the considerable acoustic variability? And is there a common denominator to the different acoustic manifestations that might explain their perceptual equivalence? Systematic acoustic, physiological, and perceptual investigations of common Danish stød now span (a little more than) three quarters of a century. This is a review of that research, to determine what may be considered established phonetic facts about common Danish stød and the open questions that remain for future research.

In this article we apply a folk linguistic listening task to examine how the Tver’ Karelians in Russia recognise a sample of their own dialect and a sample of Border Karelian (spoken in Finland), both recorded about 60 years ago. Tver’ Karelian and Border Karelian have a shared origin in Proto-Karelian but have been diverging from each other since the seventeenth century; the former has had strong influence from Russian and the latter from Finnish. The study investigates the Tver’ Karelians’ awareness of and observations about the Karelian language and shows that they easily recognise their own dialect, whereas the Border Karelian sample is harder to recognise and describe. However, the respondents observed and described lexical and phonetic features of this sample, and two thirds of them located the sample in the republic of Karelia or in Finland, mostly based on the ‘accent’ of the speaker.

This article describes variation in the use of frames of reference (FoRs; object-centred, viewpoint-centred, and geocentric, as in Holistic Spatial Semantics) in Finnish descriptions of motion and connects questions of variation to a typological framework. Recent research has described the choice of FoRs as a process with multiple factors. This complexity and controlling for the main variables posited in the literature create the starting point for the current study that explores factors affecting the choice of FoRs in motion situations and within speakers of the same language. The data were elicited from 50 native speakers of Finnish by using video stimuli. The informants were (mostly) formally educated young adults living in urban surroundings. The analysis reveals considerable variation in individual coding strategies, especially in the inclusion of the speaker’s viewpoint. It also considers variation with respect to different types of trajectories and cross-linguistic differences in the resources of spatial reference.

This paper presents a usage-based cognitive approach to the different rates at which Icelandic masculine forms in nominative/accusative plural -ur are reanalysed as feminine. Of the 14.92% of nouns in plural -ur, 91.89% are feminine, others masculine. Syncretism in nominative/accusative plural is exceptionless among feminines, but relatively rare among masculines. Interestingly, plurals such as masculine eigendur ‘owners’, fætur ‘feet’, vetur ‘winters’ occasionally yield the feminine outputs definite eigendur-nar, fætur-nar, vetur-nar, and are sometimes modified by feminine forms of adjectives and determiners. As the full set of forms in plural -ur is highly schematic, we might expect reanalysis – viewed as a property of a schema’s productivity – to correlate proportionately with the frequency of corresponding masculine forms. However, corpus data for Icelandic betray a mismatch. Through a network model approach that emphasises prototype structure, minimal schematicity is shown to impact the rate of reanalysis by means of a gang effect.

Samuli Paulaharju was a Finnish ethnographer who visited the Kven minority in Northern Norway – Ruija – in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with his wife Jenny he collected ethnographic material among the Kvens, and corresponded frequently with some of them. Many wrote in Finnish, and most were self-taught writers.

We focus on the orthography used by these writers who were writing in a multilingual environment. We identify two writing cultures, one associated with Old Literary Finnish and Early Modern Finnish, the other with Modern Written Finnish (MWF). The orthography used by the former is characterized by the use of b, d, g for p, t, k in native Finnish words, which we attribute to influence from Norwegian. By contrast, the orthography of the latter largely resembles the MWF of the time. However, both groups substitute t for d – a phenomenon found in Finland during the same time period – as well as occasionally use Norwegian characters.

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.

This paper gives a broad overview of how Norwegian productively makes use of L-reduplication to convey diminutive meaning. I argue that this previously undescribed phenomenon is a diminutivizing process that copies the stressed vowel and any consonants until the next morpheme boundary. The construction can be attested as far back as the start of the 20th century and its realization varies geographically between two main variants. I show that L-reduplication is restricted phonologically, but applies productively (unlike other echo reduplicative processes) across different parts of speech.

Research has shown the importance of vocabulary development in relation to other parts of language development, e.g. grammar and reading development. Cross-linguistic research has shown similar as well as dissimilar tendencies regarding content in different languages. This study examines, for the first time, the characteristics of Faroese children’s early productive vocabulary utilizing a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). The study participants were 415 children aged 8 to 20 months. The results provide information on the composition and characteristics of lexical development in Faroese children and demonstrate that nouns are dominant among first words, as are onomatopoetic words and words describing family relationships. Faroese children are comparable to children learning other languages with respect to rate of acquisition and composition of words, with a somewhat higher share of words describing family members as stable words in the emerging language.