Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 72 i Silly Linguistics

The word boat has an interesting history. Words can either be inherited from an older form, like Latin words slowly changing as the language developed into French and other Romance languages, or they can be borrowed. But knowing whether a word is borrowed is not always straight forward because people might not realise a word is borrowed and older documents would not mention a word being borrowed, and if they do not all words would be covered. So how do we work out if a word is borrowed? Well, we can use some linguistic sleuthing. In related languages words often follow patterns. Not always because languages are messy but we can make some deductions. All Germanic languages are descended from a language spoken in the Bronze Age that linguists call…

Linguists often draw an analogy between languages and biological species: both can be grouped into subfamilies within larger families based on common features, both have historical geographical bounds that have changed due to modernization - and in both of their cases, over 90% of them are endangered or threatened with extinction due to modernization. To further drive home the point on the similarities between languages and biological species, we can see that Wikipedia’s classification systems for languages and species are not too different from one another – particularly their endangerment classification scales. For example, compare the Wikipedia pages for the African Penguin and the Mohawk language: So, according to Wikipedia, both the African Penguin and the Mohawk language are considered Endangered by their respective organizations of experts. In the case…

Småländska is a rather generic name for the Nordic dialects spoken within Småland, a region of southeastern Sweden, with a coastline on the Baltic in the east, part of which faces the island of Öland. I have written about several of Sweden’s traditional languages before, which include North-Germanic, Sámi and Finnic languages, but the background of this rather complex picture is beyond the scope of this article. But I will briefly introduce this topic. Sweden is linguistically diverse, and many of the “dialects of Swedish” can more accurately be described as “traditional Nordic languages” which became defined as “Swedish” in more recent history, often alongside a general watering down of these older language features into more standard forms of Swedish, which has created a gradient between traditional languages and regional…