This is the first issue of volume 39 of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics. NJL is the journal of the Nordic Association of Linguists. Individuals may subscribe to the Journal by joining the Nordic Association of Linguists. The NAL membership form can be found on the Cambridge University Press web site of NJL, http://journals.cambridge.org/NJL, as well as on the NAL web site, http://www.uef.fi/nal.

The second issue of Volume 40 (autumn 2017) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to receptive multilingualism. The issue will be edited by Helka Riionheimo, Annekatrin Kaivapalu and Hanna-Ilona Härmävaara.

Swedish medical language is rich with Latin and Greek terminology which has undergone a Swedification since the 1980s. However, many original expressions are still used by clinical professionals. The goal of this study is to obtain precise quantitative measures of how the foreign terminology is manifested in Swedish clinical text. To this end, we explore the use of Latin and Greek affixes in Swedish medical texts in three genres: clinical text, scientific medical text and online medical information for laypersons. More specifically, we use frequency lists derived from tokenised Swedish medical corpora in the three domains, and extract word pairs belonging to types that display both the original and Swedified spellings. We describe six distinct patterns explaining the variation in the usage of Latin and Greek affixes in clinical text. The results show that to a large extent affixes in clinical text are Swedified and that prefixes are used more conservatively than suffixes.

Among the characteristic features of the Finnish language is the use of numerous derivational affixes and diverse word-formation options. Although Finnish has very old derivational elements, fairly recent suffixes and even completely new ways of forming words are also found. It is typical of word-formation options that they change, and that their frequency and popularity varies over time. In this diachronic study, the focus is on one of the most recent suffixes used in the Finnish language, the agentive -Ari suffix (e.g. kaahari ‘reckless driver’, kuohari ‘gelder of animals’). What makes the -Ari derivatives special is that the type has been adopted on the model of words borrowed from the Germanic languages. Historically these are descended from the Latin derivational element -ārius, which was adopted widely in the European languages. The main purpose of the present study was to find out whether, from a diachronic perspective, the -Ari-derived agent nouns actually represent an independent derived semantic category in Finnish. Another purpose was to characterize the process whereby the -Ari suffix was adopted in Finnish: at what point do these derived forms actually first occur in Finnish, and how has the use of the derivational element been manifested at different times. A final significant task of the study was to clarify the potential reasons and motivations for this morphological borrowing.

In their recent book, English: The Language of the Vikings, Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund attempt to make the case that from its Middle period onwards, English is a North Germanic language, descended from the Norse varieties spoken in Medieval England, rather than a West Germanic language, as traditionally assumed. In this review article we critique Emonds & Faarlund's proposal, focusing particularly on the syntactic evidence that forms the basis of their argumentation. A closer look at a number of constructions for which the authors suggest a Norse origin reveals that the situation is not as they present it: in many cases, the syntactic properties of Old and Middle English are not given careful enough consideration, and/or the chronology of the developments is not compatible with a Norse origin. Moreover, the authors do not engage with the large body of sound changes that constitute the strongest evidence for a West Germanic origin. We conclude that Emonds & Faarlund fail to make a convincing case either for a North Germanic origin or against a West Germanic origin.