Open Spelling of Nominal Compounds in Contemporary Swedish and the Question of English Influence

Summary

Introduction

In the research on language contact, the lion’s share of attention tends to be devoted to cross-linguistic permeation taking place on the lexical level, the reason being that this type of influence generally exhibits a very high frequency, and its outcomes are normally not difficult to detect. Nevertheless, if any structural influence is to occur, the contact between the languages involved must be both long-lasting and relatively intense (Winford 2003: 2). This is supposedly the case with contemporary English and Swedish, since what is commonly claimed to lie at the root of the phenomenon of särskrivning, i.e., a growing tendency for the constituents of Swedish nominal compounds to be written as separate words, is the influence of the English language (cf., e.g., Mårtensson and Svensson 1988; Möller 1996; Mobärg 1997; Domeij et al. 1999; Weihe 2009). However, despite its vastness, särskrivning has typically been addressed only by native Swedish researchers, and has not yet gained any wider resonance. The present article therefore aims to provide an overview of the literature on the pertinent phenomenon, thus contributing to the ongoing discussion concerning the multifaceted impact of English on other languages in the context of the linguistic norm (cf., e.g., Mańczak-Wohlfeld 2017).

The paper is organised in the following way. In Section 2, I offer an account of the spelling rules pertaining to compounds in English and Swedish, respectively. In Section 3, I outline the basic facts related to the influence of English on the Swedish language. In Section 4, I elaborate on the phenomenon of särskrivning, with a focus on the assumed English impact. Finally, in Section 5, I provide a summary of the main observations arrived at in the article as well as offer suggestions regarding further research on the topic.

The spelling of nominal compounds in English and Swedish: basic facts

In linguistics, a compound is defined as a combination of at least two free morphemes which build a semantic and syntactic unit (Josefsson 2005: 81). The constituents of compounds can include items belonging to different parts of speech: there exist, for instance, Adj+N compounds, such as English blackbird, and N+V compounds, like the Swedish compound verb tjuvlyssna ‘to eavesdrop’ (lit.: ‘thief-listen’).