Danish Language

This article deals with the history and word formation of the Icelandic word for ‘police’, i.e. lögregla. The word constitutes an interesting case of word formation in that said lexeme is a dvandva compound whose creation is related to the expression að halda uppi lögum og reglu ‘to maintain law and order’. Moreover, it is argued that the word has arisen in the wake of the Icelandic purist movement in the first half of the 19th century, and that its creator is Konráð Gíslason, who was at the time a
member of the Icelandic Literary Society (Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag) and editor of the journal Fjölnir. According to the sources, the word, lögregla, cannot have been formed as an independent lexical item. In fact, the word appears first in a compound with maður ‘man’, meaning ‘policeman’ or, more precisely, ‘a man who is in charge of maintaining
law and order’. It is argued that lögregla has in fact been created in order to gradually substitute the Danish loanword pólití, first in compounds such as pólitímaður and pólitíþjónn ‘policeman’, and then as a single lexeme. The Danish loanword pólití had a twofold meaning: ‘policeman’ and ‘police’. Moreover, it is argued that lögregla, as an unbound lexeme, was initially a shortened form for lögreglumaður, and later assumed
the general meaning ‘police force’ by means of synecdoche (pars pro toto).

2022 marks the 150 Jubilee of the first recorded Scandinavian language service in Queensland. It was held on 26 June 1872 in the Lutheran Chapel on Wickham Terrace, Brisbane, by a Norwegian, Christopher Gaustad. To honour the occasion I am reposting the following article. It is a slightly amended version of what appeared in the annual 'Journal of Friends of Lutheran Archives' in December 2012, edited by emeritus Professor and historian Maurice Schild. Some of the images here do not appear in the published version. The 1934 letter indicates that there are still documents which reveal aspects of Lutheran historiography in Australia. My attention was drawn to this letter by Bernie Muller, the Archives Liaison Officer  in Queensland, who copied the letter from  the original held by Dr. Meg Noack (nee Bjelke-Petersen). Dr. Noack gave permission for the letter to be published. The letter was written by Jens Christian Pedersen (1856-1940), to Dr. Noack’s  grandfather, Pastor Carl Georg Bjelke-Petersen (1870-1954) in Queensland . My extensive explanatory endnotes are to encourage further research; to enlarge on Pedersen's context;  to make some corrections on what has previously been written on the Scandinavian Lutherans in Queensland; and to fill out some gaps in the area of bibliographical material.

In this paper we would like to report on a study of gender assignment of English loanwords borrowed into Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. 1 Gender in the Scandinavian languages has proved to be a lively area of research, which is demonstrated by a range of recent publications. 2 Several important questions remain to be answered: most importantly, to what degree gender assignment can in these languages be regarded as regular. If it is regular, then we would like to know what formal and semantic features of the nouns are relevant in gender assignment, and how important they are with regard to one another. We want to suggest that given proper analytical tools gender assignment, while not completely regular, can to a large degree be attributed to individual criteria. Therefore we would like to validate statistically the contribution of these criteria, and measure their relative importance in the three languages. We begin with a brief description of the gender systems in the analysed languages and of the postulated gender assignment criteria. This is followed by an overview of the corpus of English loanwords and the types of analysis used in the study. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results for the three languages.

The Danish pronoun de and its inflections are traditionally described as 3rd person plural, but, as this article demonstrates, it is also used as a gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. As this pronoun - termed singular de - has not been documented or described in the literature thus far, the purpose of this article is to provide a grammatical description and analysis of singular de and its referential use in interaction. This is based on 104 occurrences of singular de in naturally occurring conversation. It is found that singular de is used with both generic and specific reference, and that interlocutors may use singular de to avoid indexing gender and orienting to it as a relevant topic in talk-in-interaction (gender-unspecified reference) or to index the referent's gender as neither male nor female (gender-specified reference). The article also parallels between singular de and English singular they, as well as sociolinguistic variation in the use of singular de which could be topics for future studies.

The book describes and analyses how non-native speakers of Danish evaluate their own as well as other non-native speakers’ accent in spoken Danish. The main research questions are:

1. Do non-native speakers of Danish recognise foreign accent in spoken Danish?

2. If so, how do non-native speakers evaluate foreign accent in spoken Danish?

3. To what degree do the non-native speakers’ attitudes towards foreign accent in spoken Danish differ from attitudes held by native speakers?

The study includes 304  guise test participants and 48 qualitative interviews.

The results show that the non-native speakers do recognise foreign accent, but that they do not evaluate foreign accent negatively. Instead of preferring accent-free speakers, they prefer the speakers that are easier for them to understand. Although the non-native participants of the study are thus not biased regarding other speakers' accents, they do show uncertainty concerning their own accents.

Both Sweden and Denmark made efforts in the early 20th century to diversify a surname stock heavy in secondary patronymics, but they adopted very different strategies, reflecting different times and prevailing linguistic models.  A Danish committee including folklorist Axel Olrik and historian Johannes Steenstrup recommended in 1904 that Danes adopt as surnames the bynames used by their ancestors, preferably documenting this use.  This represents an historical view of the language and provides an occasion to collect linguistic and folkloric material, but did not prove efficient as a means of diversifying the name stock.  By contrast, the Swedish name committee of 1921, led by the linguist Adolf Noreen, derived structural descriptions that could be used to generate new names and allowed people to choose new names freely from their list. This reflects a structuralist, synchronic approach to language which
became prevalent in the early 20th century.  Over time the rules were gradually generalized from being morphological (combining familiar elements of bourgeois compound names) toward phonological (encoding phonotactic constraints on Swedish words).  In the 1960s, computer programs were used to generate lists of well-formed Swedish surnames, a development facilitated by the generative character of existing descriptions.  The fact that currently two-thirds of the Danish population have a surname ending in -sen but only one-third of the Swedes have surnames in -sson may in part stem from the more liberal Swedish policy early on, in addition to the fact that Sweden instituted mandatory surnames some 70 years after Denmark and the transition from patronymics to surnames had progressed further before
the law came into effect.

This article examines aspects of Icelandic linguistic purism in the early 18th century, as revealed in a wordlist compiled by Jón Ólafsson from Grunnavík (1705–1779) and preserved in ms. AM 1013 4to (fol. 37v).
After a brief introduction (§ 1), there follows an overview of the development of Icelandic language purism from its late-sixteenth-century origins to the first half of the 18th century (§ 2). The description of Jón Ólafsson’s life which follows (§ 3) highlights his genealogical links with Arngrímur Jónsson the learned (1568–1648), a pioneering figure in the purism movement. The next section (§ 4) explores the wordlist itself and is divided into three subsections. The first (§ 4.1) summarises Jón’s linguistic scholarship as a whole. The second (§ 4.2) presents a diplomatic edition of the list and an analysis of eight of its word pairs, which have been chosen for their relevance with respect to their formation and ideological background. The analytical approach adopted describes the words as single lexical units in accordance with the main tenets of loanword studies, and examines the list in the light of language policy and planning studies. The final subsection (§ 4.3) highlights the relationship between the wordlist and Jón Ólafsson’s most important work, i.e. the Icelandic dictionary (AM 433 fol.). The last section (§ 5) summarises the main points of the article and sets them within the context of pre-1750 Icelandic language purism. It will be argued that Jón Ólafsson’s work is of paramount importance in the development of Icelandic purist attitudes, both lexically, because of its close relationship with the principles set out by Arngrímur Jónsson in his Crymogæa, and in terms of the later history of the movement.

Hygge is a keyword in Danish culture and a product of the distinctive
Danish social ethos which developed in the late 19th and early 20th Century. The aim of this chapter is to provide a semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis of the concept hidden in this word, and the two main questions are: What does hygge mean, and which cultural values are co-construed with the word? (Ch3 in "Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition")

*FOR CITATIONS PLEASE USE "SHEILA LOUISE WRIGHT"*  Also see the audio/video of this piece here:
https://youtu.be/NNiiu9xUUic
This paper was written as documentation for the SCA (Society For Creative Anachronism), Kingdom of An Tir Bardic Championships 2015.

This ballad fragment is the oldest extant example of both balladry AND written musical notation in Scandinavia. Found at the end of a law text from around 1300-1320, it is an intriguing piece of history, but given the context of the text it is found in, what does the fragment REALLY mean?

A number of different languages in the Indo-European family were analyzed based on how difficult it would be for a native English speaker to learn them. They were then rated on a purely impressionistic 1-6 scale of easiest to most difficult. English was also discussed in terms of the difficulties it might present to an English learner. Extensive phonological, morphological, syntactic and even semantic analysis was done for many of these tongues to highlight areas of difficulty for English learners. Very long: 99 pages.

The Danish language, like many other 'Western' languages, does not have any human-referent gender neutral third person singular pronoun that is "officially" recognized in the sense that it is taught in language classes, used in public documents, or included in most dictionaries. Nevertheless, many individuals prefer being referred to with pronouns that do not designate that individual as either female or male, which prompts linguistic innovation and creativity. This article is a pilot study presenting the initial results of a 7-question survey investigating the use of gender neutral and nonbinary/genderqueer pronouns in Danish. Based on 75 responses, it is found that the pronouns most people prefer others to refer to them with are de 'they' (the third person plural), den 'it' (the third person singular common gender, conventionally used to refer to objects and non-pet animals), and hen (third person singular neologism), as well as hun 'she' and han 'he'. The survey targeted two groups of respondents: 1) Nonbinary/genderqueer individuals and 2) Women and men who wish to be referred to with pronouns other than hun/han. The final section of the article suggests several topics for further research of gender neutral and nonbinary/genderqueer pronouns, both in Danish and in other languages.

В монографии дается полное описание синтаксиса порядка слов и синтаксиса субъектно-предикатных отношений в пяти современных языках скандинавской группы германской семьи - датском, норвежском, шведском, исландском, фарёрском, а также в языке древнейших скандинавских рукописных памятников и языке континентальных скандинавских текстов переходного периода. Описание опирается на единую сетку параметров, значения которых проверяются в корпусе памятников. Обосновывается новая классификация систем порядка слов в языках мира: языки с предикатными энклитиками, где действует закон Ваккернагеля, выделены в особый тип. Впервые строго доказывается факт действия закона Ваккернагеля в древних германских языках. Обсуждается гипотеза о неуниверсальности синтаксического членения и рассматриваются формы реализации категории подлежащего. Выделяется четыре типа двусоставных конструкций без подлежащего в имен.п. Доказывается наличие слов категории состояния в древнескандинавских языках и исследуется связь между семантикой предиката и структурой предложении. В Приложении помещен Словарь древнеисландских предикативов (стр. 789-845), где собраны ок. 700 именных форм, используемых в корпусе памятников исключительно в функции сказуемого.

Chapter 1, Table of Content, frontmatter and index of the upcoming monograph in Routledge's FOCUS series (May 2019)

The present book argues that linguistic concepts need to be applicable across various languages and philologies in order to be meaningful and to stand the test of time. If we are to make lasting progress, we need to have clarity with regards to basic terms, concepts and notions. Every bi- or multilingual student of more than one philology will have noticed a certain dissonance of a given language's concepts with another one. It is here argued that linguists should accept such differences only when there are compelling reasons for them to be moulded into terms and therefore into our conceptualizations of language.
Recent years have seen the use of a concept called "pluri-areality" in German dialectology. "Pluri-areality" and "pluri-areal" are my renderings from the original German "pluriareale Sprache" (Wolf 1994: 74, Scheuringer 1996). "Pluri-areality" directly contradicts the established concept of pluricentricity in its fundamental assumptions of how national varieties are to be modelled. The two approaches will be discussed at length and contrasted before the backdrop of the Germanic languages that are at the centre of this book, with a focus on English and German as the two languages that mark the difference in approach most clearly.

This paper describes the CoreGram project, a multilingual grammar engineering project that develops HPSG grammars for several typologically diverse languages that share a common core. The paper provides a general motivation for doing theoretical linguistics the way it is done in the CoreGram
project and therefore is not targeted to computational linguists exclusively. I argue for a constraint-based approach to language rather than a generative-enumerative one and discuss issues of formalization. Recent advantages in the language acquisition research are mentioned and conclusions
on how theories should be constructed are drawn. The paper discusses some of the highlights in the implemented grammars, gives a brief overview of central theoretical concepts and their implementation in TRALE and compares the CoreGram project with other multilingual grammar engineering projects.

This dissertation investigates learner beliefs, language ideologies, self-positioning, and language use among a group of Swiss university students of Danish as a foreign language. The theoretical framework of the study draw on socially informed second language acquisition (SLA) research and on late modern sociolinguistics.

Research questions
• What do Swiss university students of Danish as a foreign language believe about language and language learning, why do they hold these beliefs, and how do the beliefs relate to language ideologies?
• How do the participants present themselves in terms of beliefs, ideologies, and self-positioning? 
• In what ways do the participants use linguistic features generally thought to belong to different languages, to what degree can their language use be compared with polylingual behaviour, and how does their language use relate to the beliefs and ideologies expressed by the participants?

Data
During three semesters, or a year and a half, three types of data were collected from the 49 participants: Questionnaires for background knowledge, learning journals for the study of beliefs and ideologies, as well as individual and group audio recordings for the study of language use.

Main findings
At the beginning of the three semester course, the participants generally express structure-focussed beliefs about language and language learning, whereas at the end of the course, they focus more on communicative approaches to language learning. The beliefs held by the participants are influenced by their comprehensive experience with language learning. The change from a structural to a communicative focus may be explained by a socialisation process during the course, or by changes in the participants’ perceived and actual sociolinguistic progression.

The participants further express ideas about language and language learning, which relate to institutional and societal language ideologies. The participants express ideas about language as a system, languages as separate entities, and authentic target languages.

Self-positioning is carried out by the participants at the earliest stages of language learning, and the position themselves as high expectancy students, language experts, and hard-working students. This self-positioning is closely linked with the classroom setting.

The beliefs and ideas held by the participants are compared with the way they use language in written and oral form. In some cases, the participants use features generally thought to belong to different languages for language play, but in most instances the participants try to use features that are exclusively associated with Danish, and their use of features generally thought to belong to different languages is not intentional. This finding leads to a theoretical discussion of the notion of polylanguaging, particularly how the concepts of stylisation, ideologies, repertoire, and awareness can be integrated into the definition of polylanguaging.

This is the published text of my italian translation of "Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed" by Søren Kierkegaard, published by ETS in December 2006.

"Sulla mia attività di scrittore uscì a Copenaghen nel 1851, dopo che per almeno un lustro il suo autore, Søren Kierkegaard, si era sforzato di redigere una sorta di "guida alla lettura" della sua complessa produzione letteraria, composta di opere pubblicate in parte col proprio nome e in parte sotto pseudonimi.
Questo libriccino - denso compendio del più ampio Il punto di vista per la mia attività di scrittore, pubblicato postumo nel 1859 - contiene dunque le informazioni essenziali che Kierkegaard desiderava fornire ai suoi contemporanei sull'articolazione interna del complesso dei suoi scritti e sul suo ruolo di scrittore cristiano.
Nel Supplemento Kierkegaard offre anche un manifesto "teologico-politico" del suo rapporto con l'"ordine costituito" e con gli avvenimenti del 1848".

Multilingual education is an essential matter of public concern for modern societies shaped by migration and it remains an important research issue. This article sheds light onto the implementation of autochthonous and allochthonous minority languages such as Danish, Romany, Russian, and Turkish into the German educational system. To observe how these languages are implemented the following aspects are analyzed: official legislation with respect to the consideration of these languages in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, their status as a foreign language or a heritage language at school, the situation of teacher education at universities, and the professional development of adequate curricula and learning material. The findings do not only show severe differences between the categories autochthonous and allochthonous but also within them. Potential causes for these differences are discussed and consequences for official legislation as well as for the minority speakers themselves are figured out for a sustained language education at school.

This paper discusses copula constructions in English, German, and Danish and argues that a uniform analysis of all copula constructions is inappropriate. We provide evidence from German that there should be a raising variant of the copula in addition to an identificational copula. The raising version of the copula does not contribute semantically contrary to Montague and Van Eynde. Rather a unary schema is provided that maps referential NPs that can be used as arguments onto predicational NPs. Data from Danish shows that predicational NPs can be subjects in specificational structures. An account for such specificational structures is provided and the different behaviour of predicational and specificational structures with regard to question tags is explained. A similar contrast can be found in German left dislocation structures, which follows from the assumptions made in this paper.

A modified treatment of complex predicate formation allows for a reduction of selectional features in HPSG (that is abolishing of XCOMP or VCOMP) and for a uniform treatment of predicational phrases in copula constructions and resultative secondary predicates. This yields an account for constituent order variants that remained unexplained by earlier analyses.

Omar Pérez Santiago presentó el 2014, el libro “Caricias”, con traducciones de la poesía de amor de la leyenda de la poesía punk de los años 80, el danés y anarquista Michael Strunge. El domingo 9 de marzo de 1986, el poeta tenía 27 años, corrió y se lanzó por la ventana. Michael Strunge es hoy un gran mito. Muchos jóvenes llegan hoy a su tumba y sobre ella dejan figuras de corazones rojos.

This paper discusses the problems in the interscandinavian communication between Swedes, Danes and Norwegians. Furthermore it presents the possible strategies, which can be used to improve the understanding between the participants in an interscandinavian discourse.

The typology of word prosody is still a subject of debate. Tone and stress remain the central units of classification; however, there is not an established consensus about their definitions. In this chapter, I focus on two specific word-prosodic units with a non-pitch based primary phonetic exponent: prosodic quantity in Standard Estonian and prosodic laryngealization in Copenhagen Danish. I summarize their main phonetic and functional features with special attention placed on their relation to pitch and stress in the respective languages. I also compare these prosodic units with functionally similar cases of pitch-based word prosody in other languages and put them in the framework of mainstream word-prosodic typology. Both cases are challenging for the typology, as they are full-fledged phonological word-prosodic units, but do not qualify either as tone or as stress. In the end, I discuss a possible input from such cases into the debate on distinction between the notions of tone, stress, and accent.

Det Persiske sprog, også kendt som Parsi eller Farsi, primært tales i Iran, Afghanistan og Tadsjikistan. Persisk er også tales af mindretal i Irak, Usbekistan, Tyrkiet, De Forenede Arabiske Emirater, Bahrain og nogle andre regioner. Persisk har haft en betydelig indflydelse på nabosprog, især Tyrkiske sprog i Centralasien, Anatolien, Kaukasus og de omkringliggende Iranske sprog, samt Armensk, Arabisk og andre. Påvirket Også nogle sydasiatiske sprog, især Urdu, samt, i mindre grad, Hindi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengalsk og nogle andre beslægtede sprog.

The aim of this thesis is to create a complex and three-dimensional overview of East Norse dialects in the age of runic inscription (approximately 700 AD through 1200 AD). It does so through the use of two innovations – namely, variable co-occurrence and network analysis – that allow for greater depth and complexity than previous studies offer. Prior scholarship has focused primarily on only one set of linguistic variables. By examining and analyzing the occurrences of two sets of variables simultaneously, this thesis exponentially increases the complexity – and thus credibility – of the resultant dialectal analysis. Creating networks of runic inscriptions based on these co-occurrences makes it possible to free dialectal data from abstract tables and visualize linguistic connections and patterns in a previously unexplored manner. By so doing, this thesis presents new and innovative insight into the dialects of Runic Swedish, Runic Danish, and Runic Gutnish and paves the way for future digital research into the same.