This study investigates the referential forms children use to introduce characters in Swedish, in a cross-sectional sample of oral narratives by 100 Turkish/Swedish bilinguals aged 4 to 7 and in a longitudinal sample from age 4 to 6 (N = 10). We analysed development with age and how language proficiency (expressive vocabulary) and exposure affect children’s use of referring expressions, with a focus on referential appropriateness. In addition, a qualitative analysis of the characteristics of high- and low-performing children was carried out. The results show significant effects of age and language proficiency, but not of language exposure on appropriate use of referring expressions. At age 7, 69% of the characters were introduced with an indefinite NP. The Turkish/Swedish bilinguals were found to lag behind in their use of indefinite NPs in comparison to Swedish-speaking children investigated in previous studies, with little crosslinguistic influence from L1 Turkish.

The status of the phoneme /s/ as the only sibilant of Finnish makes its pronunciation relatively free. This enables /s/ variants to gain social meaning, a tendency typical in many societies. In Finnish society, studies so far have documented how variation in /s/ pronunciation has faced concerns, originating from late-nineteenth-century nation building and Finnish language norm construction processes. Against the norm of the voiceless alveolar /s/, fronted variants first represented Swedish influence and a threat to norms of ‘good Finnish’, later meeting more global indexes. The historical development of the /s/ ideology is still echoed in the contemporary social meaning potentials of /s/ variation. By focusing on learning materials used in the Finnish education system during the period from the 1900s to the 1970s, this article investigates how formal education has contributed to the ideology of the (im)proper Finnish /s/, manifested in the ideological construct of ‘Helsinki s’.

Rhythm typology seeks to classify languages according to the units on which they base their rhythm. The most used categories are stress-timing, syllable-timing, and mora-timing. Traditional rhythm typology has been questioned by instrumental research, because the claimed isochronous units have not been found. Speech cycling is a method that endeavours to find regular rhythmic units by utilising repeated speech that the speaker produces by accommodating to regularly paced stimuli. This is intended to eliminate the irregularities that would otherwise hide the linguistic rhythm. The present study is a speech cycling experiment on Finnish. The subjects read sentences that were varied in the mora and syllable count. The locations of the stressed syllables were analysed on a relative scale to see if they appear at regular phases. The results show that in Finnish the mora, the syllable, and the quantity pattern all affect the phases.

Based on a linguistic ethnographic study of student–teacher classroom interactions, this article sheds light on language norms in a contemporary Danish STX school (upper secondary education, also known as gymnasiums). The analysis reveals that neither classrooms with the explicit teaching of an ‘academic register’ nor classrooms where teachers orient towards a youth norm constitute spaces where students have equal access to perform as good students. Even when students can decode and reproduce the language preferred by the teachers, they do not experience an equal opportunity to conform to this. It is argued that performing linguistically as good and competent students is more complex than just adapting to a specific school norm, as the students have to navigate different teacher’s norms as well as peer norms emphasising authenticity.

In Danish, the distribution of stød exhibits a pattern related to the position of the stressed syllable. Some phonological theories of stød, e.g. Basbøll (2005), consider stød on the antepenultimate or ultimate syllable, and non-stød on the penultimate syllable, to be the default. This article reports on a production study with nonce words, investigating the distributional pattern of stød in relation to the position of the stressed syllable in monomorphemic nonce words. Ten speakers were asked to pronounce 336 nonce words with stress on either the ultimate, penultimate, or antepenultimate syllable. The results showed that stød on ultimate stressed syllables and non-stød on penultimate stressed syllables replicates in nonce words, but stød on antepenultimate stressed syllables does not. This suggests that stød in antepenultimate stressed words is not the default, but lexical.

This study reports the outcomes of a speaker evaluation experiment conducted in a higher educational context in Flanders, in which we investigated the influence of language variety (Standard vs. Colloquial Dutch), accent (Flemish vs. Eastern European) and name (Flemish vs. Eastern European) on students’ perceptions of a female university instructor. The results suggest that participants exhibited a relatively high level of tolerance toward both non-conforming speech and non-conforming speakers. Whereas Colloquial Dutch scored lower than Standard Dutch on standardness, we observed no negative effects of Colloquial Dutch on the teacher’s didactic competence, status, or social attractiveness. We did not find any evidence of a negative bias triggered by an Eastern European name. Whereas the Eastern European accent did have a negative impact on the teacher’s social attractiveness, we did not find any evidence of an accent bias affecting judgements of the teacher’s didactic competence and status.

This paper discusses the social meaning of variation in adnominal gender marking in the Dutch dialect of North Brabant. Previous studies reveal that the masculine gender suffix gains social meaning at the expense of grammatical function. However, it remains unclear what kinds of meanings the suffix can have, and how it becomes part of a Brabantish speech style. Therefore, we present statements from ten focus group interviews featuring 50 younger and older speakers. In these sessions, participants were asked to reflect on hyperdialectal usages of the gender suffix. We argue that the indexicalization of the suffix does not yield one fixed social meaning but rather a range of potential meanings, i.e. indexical field, that can be called upon by individual speakers depending on the context. However, the ranges of potential meanings clearly differ between both age groups, unraveling the different norms associated with the suffix.

This semi-systematic literature review examines signed language corpus research in the Nordic countries, with a quantitative and qualitative assessment of corpus research. The article first describes some critical components and functionalities of signed language corpora. It then outlines the evolution of Nordic corpus research, highlighting Sweden’s pioneering role and subsequent developments in Finland and Norway. The findings suggest a progression from method-focused publications to those exploring linguistic phenomena within and across (signed) languages. Although the number of research publications is modest, there is a discernible shift towards comparative studies and applications in signed language teaching and learning.

This article presents structural and interactional aspects of Strong Finals, a prosodic feature characterised by lengthening, increased volume, and non-falling intonation on word-final syllables. Interactionally, Strong Finals support five types of action: listing, projecting a description, stating conditions, asking questions, and announcing reported speech. In general, Strong Finals project that there is more to come, and this ‘more’ may in some cases be provided by either participant. Strong Finals are often found in multi-speaker settings, where they assist speakers in taking the floor or changing the topic. The article’s descriptions are based on recordings of natural spoken interaction in linguistically diverse areas in Aarhus, Denmark. Here, a new urban dialect has developed like other urban dialects that have been described in Copenhagen and other North Germanic cities. Strong Finals are a local phenomenon, however, and are not found in the Copenhagen studies.

Alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verbs in Icelandic are notorious for instantiating two diametrically opposed argument structures: the Dat-Nom and the Nom-Dat construction. We conduct a systematic study of the relevant verbs to uncover the factors steering the alternation. This involves a comparison of 15 verbs, five alternating ones, and as a control, five Nom-Dat verbs and five non-alternating Dat-Nom verbs. Our findings show that alternating verbs instantiate the Nom-Dat construction 54% of the time and the Dat-Nom construction 46% of the time on average for four of five verbs when both arguments are full NPs. However, in configurations with a nominative pronoun, the Nom-Dat construction takes precedence over the Dat-Nom construction. Also, for the double-NP configuration, a logistic regression analysis identifies indefiniteness and length as two key predictors, apart from nominative case marking. We demonstrate that the latter systematically correlates with discourse-prominence, which we show, upon closer inspection, correlates with topicality.

The Gutnish-specific si-passive combines be or become with a participle, directly followed by the element si. Unlike regular periphrastic passives, si-passives focus on the process rather than the result, opening up the construction for unergatives, which are unattested in the regular type. However, si-passives are quite limited when it comes to the subject. Internal arguments can only become subjects if they strand a preposition or a particle. Otherwise, the subject is expletive. I argue that si is part of the participle ending in Aspo, where its phi-features block agreement with the internal argument, trapping it in situ and depriving Aspo of a link to the result of the event. Originally a reflexive, si was reanalysed as a marker of the participle rather than the infinitive in contexts where conjugational changes had made them ambiguous. These changes never affected Fårö, where the si-passive is thus correctly predicted to be absent.

This paper presents an acoustic study of coarticulation of Argentine Danish /ts/ using Centre of Gravity (CoG) as the acoustic measure. It shows that the articulation of /ts/ is affected by the roundedness of the following vowel, and that this is more prevalent among speakers of Argentine Danish than among speakers of Modern Danish as spoken in Denmark. The analysis also shows that within Argentine Danish, the speakers of the isolated settlement Eldorado have a larger effect of roundedness in their articulation of /ts/ than the speakers of the settlements in the Pampas and in Buenos Aires. The results are discussed from the perspective of phonological theory on enhanced coarticulation as a source of sound change and from the perspective of theory of language change in heritage languages.

This paper examines patterns in an Estonian–English bilingual child’s spontaneous speech, employing a computational application of the traceback method, which is used in usage-based linguistics. Forty-five hours of data were analyzed to check what proportion of patterns from code-mixed utterances are attested in the child’s monolingual data and in her input. Pattern overlap between the child’s and the caregivers’ speech was also examined. Results show that about one-third of code-mixed utterances can be traced back to the child’s input and one-third also to her own monolingual data. A little over half of the child’s utterances are either chunks or frame-and-slot patterns from the caregivers’ speech. These results make it evident that the traceback method can also be applied to language pairs that are genealogically more distant, though limitations exist.

In this article, we report on a number of violations of (or exceptions to) the so-called V2 constraint in different variants of Icelandic. The main purpose is to investigate what these violations can tell us about the nature of the V2 constraint, its vulnerability, the limits of syntax, and about children’s ability to sort out what is relevant and what is not in the input they hear during the acquisition period. Three main explanatory possibilites are taken under consideration: the use and acceptance of sentences with V2 violations in Icelandic (i) is due to English influence, (ii) indicates an expansion of patterns existing in the language for language-internal reasons, (iii) is due to a task effect. In brief, our results support (i) for heritage Icelandic but not for non-heritage Icelandic, while different subsets of our data are best accounted for in terms of either (ii) or (iii).

This corpus study compares the use of Danish prepositions in the writing of L1 users of Danish to that of L2 users of Danish (with English as their L1). It examines to what extent non-standard usage is a specific L2 phenomenon and to what degree the challenges with prepositions are shared between the L1 and L2 group. We analyze the distribution and characteristics of non-standard usage involving four frequent Danish prepositions: til ‘to’, i ‘in’, på ‘on’, and for ‘for’. The results show that L2 texts are characterized by a larger share of non-standard tokens and by confusion of prepositions and non-prepositions. Yet, both L1 texts and L2 texts have non-standard usage and both have possible English calques. Based on the similarities between the two groups, we recommend that future studies include naturally occurring L1 production as a baseline for describing characteristics of L2 production.

Finnish nonfinite clauses constitute a complex grammatical class with a seemingly chaotic mix of verbal and nominal properties. Thirteen nonfinite constructions, their selection, control, thematic role assignment, nonfinite agreement, embedded subjects, and syntactic status were targeted for analysis. An analysis is proposed which derives their syntactic and semantic properties by relying on a computational model of human information processing. The model analyzes Finnish nonfinite constructions as truncated clauses with one functional layer above the verb phrase. Research methods from naturalistic cognitive science and computational linguistics are considered as potentially useful tools for linguistics.

The focus of this article is on OKAY as a resource for regulating language and constructing norm centres in authentic consultation meetings related to academic writing and recorded in Finland and Sweden. It gives an overview of all occurrences of OKAY in the interactional data in question, revealing that the word occurs frequently in academic writing consultations in Finnish, Finland Swedish, and Sweden Swedish. There are similarities in the frequency of its use and the distribution of occurrences between counsellor and student in the Finnish and the Finland-Swedish data, whereas the Sweden-Swedish counselling interactions follow a slightly different pattern. Through the lens of conversation analysis and systemic–functional linguistics, we further demonstrate how the counsellors and the students use the evaluative content word OKAY as a resource for regulating both academic writing and the counselling interaction, and thereby position themselves epistemically and orient towards different centres of norms.

Decades of research on bilingual grammars corroborate the integrated nature of these systems, leading to the conjecture that these representations are ‘shared’ (Marian & Spivey 2003, Kroll & Gollan 2014, Putnam et al. 2018). A specific population of bilinguals, namely heritage language speakers, shows a tendency for highly variable allomorphy (Polinsky 2018, Putnam et al. 2021); however, with this aspect of grammar that is often in a state of flux, there are instances of stability. Here we thoroughly investigate the stability of tense allomorphy of in North American Norwegian (NAmNo), a moribund heritage language spoken in the Upper Midwestern United States. Formally, we build upon initial observations provided by Lykke (2020), showing how a late-insertion approach to the syntax–phonological interface in combination with events, features, and precedence (EFP) phonology (Raimy 2000, Papillon 2020, Idsardi 2022) provides a straightforward account of the structural complexities that determine exponency in bilingual grammars.

This study presents results of two experiments using supervised machine-learning models to examine individual Finnish speakers’ dialectal backgrounds. Data come from interviews conducted with heritage speakers of Finnish in northern Wisconsin and are compared to data from the Finnish Dialect Syntax Archive. The models were constructed and then, following successful validation testing, used to identify the dialectal background of five individual American Finnish speakers. Results showed individual variation in dialectal backgrounds and some correlation to speakers’ likely language input. Our approach offers a new methodological tool for examining speakers’ dialectal backgrounds in situations of language contact.

This article introduces the Finnish Corpus of Online Registers (FinCORE) representing the full range of registers – situationally defined text varieties such as news and blogs – on the Finnish Internet. The extreme range of language use found online has challenged the study of registers. It has been unclear what registers the entire Internet includes, and if they can be sufficiently defined to allow for their analysis or classification, previous studies focusing on restricted sets of registers and English. FinCORE features 10,754 texts from the unrestricted web, manually annotated for their register using a scheme originally established for the Corpus of Online Registers of English (CORE). We present the FinCORE registers and compare them to CORE. Finally, we show that the FinCORE registers are sufficiently well-defined to allow for their automatic identification, thus opening novel possibilities for both linguistics and web-as-corpus research. FinCORE is published under an open license.