We investigated the intelligibility of written Danish for Swedes, and in particular the role of inherited words compared to non-Germanic loanwords. To assess whether shared loanwords are easier to understand than inherited words, we conducted two experiments. First, we tested the intelligibility of isolated Danish words (inherited words and loanwords) among Swedes. Second, we constructed two versions of a reading test, one with a large percentage of loanwords and one with few loanwords. Our results show that it is easier for Swedish listeners to identify and understand Danish cognate loanwords than inherited words and that texts with many loanwords are easier to read than texts with few loanwords. We explain these results by the fact that (recent) loans in Swedish have diverged less and are therefore more similar to the Danish counterparts than inherited words.

Are some languages universally seen as beautiful? And if so, what are the linguistic traits that make some languages sound more pleasing than others? This paper addresses these two questions. We do so with results from two listener experiments that use speech samples from a bilingual Danish–Swedish speaker in a matched guise test, where the listeners are ‘previously unexposed’ students from central China. Our results indicate that listeners from Central China with no previous exposure find Swedish more pleasing sounding than Danish. This finding provides evidence that there could be features of language that sound more beautiful to listeners cross-culturally. In a follow-up experiment we remove the intonation contours of the speech to see whether this prosodic trait plays a role for evaluations. The results show that the difference in evaluations between Swedish and Danish disappears when both speech samples are monotonised. We discuss the importance of our findings for language attitudes research.

In this paper, I examine a case of vowel insertion found in Savo and Pohjanmaa dialects of Finnish that is typically called “epenthesis”, but which demonstrates characteristics of both phonetic excrescence and phonological epenthesis. Based on a phonological analysis paired with an acoustic corpus study, I argue that Finnish vowel insertion is the mixed result of phonetic excrescence and the phonologization of these vowels, and is related to second-mora lengthening, another dialectal phenomenon. I propose a gestural model of second-mora lengthening that would generate vowel insertion in its original phonetic state. The link to second-mora lengthening provides a unified account that addresses both the dialectal and phonological distribution of the phenomenon, which have not been linked in previous literature.

It has been reported that speakers of Danish understand more Swedish than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than vice versa. We hypothesise that literate speakers of Danish use their orthographic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. To test this hypothesis, first-language (L1) Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited to study the online brain responses during decoding operations. Results showed that ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was inconsistent with the Danish spelling were significantly more negative-going than ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was consistent with the Danish spelling between 750 ms and 900 ms after stimulus onset. Together with higher word-recognition scores for consistent items, our data provide strong evidence that online activation of L1 orthography enhances word recognition of spoken Swedish in literate speakers of Danish.

Sounds spoken on the inbreath have been shown to be common in the world’s languages, and in the Nordic languages ingressive speech seems to be especially frequent. The present study focuses on Finnish and Danish response particles spoken on the inbreath, by examining their uses in everyday talk-in-interaction in corpora of recorded interactions. The particles we examine and their non-ingressive counterparts can perform confirming and acknowledging actions. We analyze the particles as receipts to answers to questions, as responses to questions, as responses to assessments, and as responses to affiliation-seeking utterances. In these positions, the ingressive particles turn out to index that the content of the previous turn was already sufficiently established and, consequently, that there is nothing to add. In cases where an engaged response is called for, the particles are shown to have a disaffiliative potential.

This study investigates how givenness and pronominality affect the dative alternation in Norwegian. Previous studies have found givenness to influence the Double Object Dative (DOD) but not the Prepositional Dative (PD). Thirty-one Norwegian native speakers completed a speeded acceptability judgment task, in which given objects were expressed by definite DPs or pronouns, and either preceded or followed the new referent. DODs were found to be highly sensitive to givenness. Surprisingly, PDs also showed contextual dependency. Referring expressions affected the two structures differently: reaction times were faster with pronouns in DODs and slower in PDs. This suggests that the alternates have different processing biases, with the former preferring pronouns and the latter DPs. The results are further considered in relation to the notion of harmonic alignment, as PDs, in which the typically animate recipient is always the second object, and will thus consistently represent a suboptimal and non-harmonious order when givenness is adhered to.