Innehållsförteckning för Issue 73 från Silly Linguistics

If you have ever studied child language acquisition before, you may have heard of the ‘critical period’ (Lenneberg, 1967) – usually referred to as the age between 0-5 where a child can acquire a first language. Anything after that, and the child will, as studies have proven, never be able to fully grasp a language fully (grammatically and lexically). What I endeavour to shine a light on is the critical period for second language learners regarding accent; this critical period is the period in which a language learner can fully sound like a native speaker. In other words, the research into the question ‘Can I ever sound like a native speaker if I’m an older language learner?'. Surprisingly, despite the number of adult second language (L2) learners there are in…

A viral video from 2013 went like this: a White man approaches an Asian American woman and strikes up conversation. After a few exchanges, he asks, “Where are you from? Your English is perfect.” - a question that has become cliché to many Asian Americans. She responds, “San Diego. We speak English there.” Unsatisfied with this answer, he proceeded to ask a series of questions about her ancestry, then spoke about East Asian cultures like a caricature (bowing in respect, references to teriyaki and kimchi – you can probably imagine what was going through his head). The video’s 10 million+ viewers can sit back and laugh at this bumbling, insensitive man for making a fool of himself. But the video also hits on something that has been extensively studied and…

As language changes over time, it undergoes a lot of small changes over the course of centuries. These changes can only be measured many years later, once they have been completed and their consequences have been accepted by those speaking it. A difficulty in measuring language change is the need to collect authentic data. How do we find out what people 1000 years ago have been saying? Was it identical to the written accounts that survived through time? In some cases, we will have to speculate, in other cases linguists collect all the data they can about a certain language family and construct older versions depending on the rules they discover, to get closer to the lost root of a language. In this article, I want to shed light on…

Written in late May 2024. Photo by Anchor2009 of Wikimedia commons (see below the photo for more relevant information about the photo). This article is in a sense a continuation from my previous article in Silly Linguistics: Småländska and language in relation to Småland. In this new article, I would like to discuss some different aspects to language in Southern Sweden, starting with a region of southwestern Sweden known as Värmland. The region of Värmland borders Dalarna to the east, Lake Vänern to the south, and Norway to the west. Those familiar will know that Dalarna has its own highly interesting Nordic languages, including Elfdalian, but these Dalecarlian languages will not be discussed here. Värmländska, Värmlandic The traditional Nordic language(s) of Värmland are referred to as Värmländska in Swedish. These…