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The Nordic Languages and Typology

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The Nordic Languages and Typology Nor Jnl Ling 34.2, 75–82 C Nordic Association of Linguists 2011 doi:10.1017/S0332586511000187 Eriksen, Pal˚ Kristian & Camilla Wide. 2011. Introduction: The Nordic languages and typology. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 34(2), 75–82. Introduction: The Nordic languages and typology Pal˚ Kristian Eriksen & Camilla Wide Pal˚ Kristian Eriksen, Agnefestveien Rosfjord, 4580 Lyngdal, Norway. [email protected] Camilla Wide, Scandinavian Languages, School of Languages and Translation Studies, 20014 University of Turku, Finland. camilla.wide@utu.fi 1. THE NORDIC COUNTRIES AND THEIR LANGUAGES The theme of this special issue is the languages of the Nordic countries and linguistic typology. By ‘the Nordic countries’ we refer to the five countries of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. Genetically, the Nordic languages are divided between the Uralic and the Indo-European language families. The Indo-European languages are represented through the North Germanic branch, and conversely the ‘homeland’ of the North Germanic branch is more or less exclusively located within the borders of the Nordic countries.1 The Uralic languages are represented through most of the languages of the Sami branch (from Southwest to Northeast: South Sami, Ume Sami, Pite Sami, Lule Sami, North Sami, Inari Sami and Skolt Sami; the remaining two Sami languages, Kildin and Ter Sami, are both spoken on the Kola peninsula in Russia), and the Finnic branch, with the four closely related varieties Finnish, Karelian (Eastern Finland), Kven (Northern Norway) and Meankieli¨ (Northern Sweden). Of the six papers in this special issue, five deal with Scandinavian languages and one with Finnish. The Germanic and Uralic languages are thus the main focus of this volume. However, to give a full overview of the language flora in the Nordic countries a few other language groups must be mentioned. First of all, a number of local varieties of Romani are spoken by groups of Romani people who have migrated to the area. Secondly, local types of sign languages are spoken in all five Nordic countries. Thirdly, Greenland, belonging to the Nordic countries politically, although in terms of physical geography a part of the North American continent, has a number of varieties of Inuit languages/dialects, with West Greenlandic being the most prominent. Finally, a large number of other languages are spoken by modern immigrant communities in all countries. There is variation in the distribution of language areas across the Nordic countries. For some language types, the entire region, or most of it, forms a language Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 26 Sep 2021 at 08:03:35, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 76 P AL˚ KRISTIAN ERIKSEN & CAMILLA WIDE area. Others are neatly divided between the Uralic languages and the North Germanic languages. Yet others may have more fine-grained distributions. (For an extensive survey of an area partially overlapping with the Nordic countries, see Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001, and for the typological development of Scandinavian languages, see Bandle et al. 2002, 2005, especially Askedal 2005). The Nordic language area is also characterized by a large array of dialects within the individual languages. At the same time, Nordic languages are themselves to a large degree mutually intelligible (e.g. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, and so are Finnish, Meankieli¨ and Kven). To some extent, one may therefore think of the Nordic language area as consisting of huge dialect continuums. 2. A META-TYPOLOGY OF LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY The connection between Nordic languages and linguistic typology can be understood in several ways, and this is reflected in the different approaches adopted in the papers of this issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics. This follows from the fact that the term ‘typology’ in itself is ambiguous and is used in a variety of ways among linguists, as well as within individual linguists’ vocabularies. We will not promote any prescriptive norm for what counts as the proper meaning of ‘typology’ but we will make an attempt at mapping the various concepts covered by and related to the term ‘typology’, and propose a tentative meta-typology that classifies various uses of the term.2 This meta-typology is given in the list below. (i) A TYPOLOGY OF SEMANTIC/FUNCTIONAL ENTITIES. A given semantic/functional domain may be divided into types, e.g. the domain of tense may be subdivided into present tense, past tense, future tense, perfect tense, past perfect, etc. (ii) A TYPOLOGY OF FORMAL LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS. A semantic/functional domain as in (i) may be realized formally in a number of ways, and a typology of these may be given, e.g. the domain of negation may be realized through a particle, a clitic, bound morphology, an auxiliary, etc. (iii) A TYPOLOGY OF ABSTRACTIONS OVER LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS. Functional and formal phenomena as those outlined in (i) and (ii) are surface realizations. Beyond this, however, one may draw generalizations and abstractions across the surface forms and extract a more abstract but linguistically more telling typology, e.g. different word order parameters lead to the postulation of the more abstract and encompassing head–dependent type and the dependent–head type. Also implicational universals (if a language has X, then it has Y; if a language does not have X, it does not have Y) constitute typologies of this kind, as it follows that each setting of the implication (e.g. +X or –X) constitutes a linguistic type. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 26 Sep 2021 at 08:03:35, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. THE NORDIC LANGUAGES AND TYPOLOGY 77 (iv) A TYPOLOGY OF GRAMMATICALIZATION. Point (iii) above refers to a level of abstraction across points (i) and (ii). Another way in which one may generalize across (i) and (ii) is to do research on how (ii) (the formal expressions) develop from (i) (the functional categories) – i.e. what is known as grammaticalization. One may thus also establish typologies of sources or processes of grammaticalization of a particular grammatical phenomenon. For example, perfects may be distinguished into types according to whether they have developed from dedicated resultative constructions (‘be’-perfects), possessive constructions (‘have’-perfects) or constructions involving words such as ‘already’ or ‘finish’ (Dahl & Velupillai 2005:271). (v) A TYPOLOGY OF LANGUAGES. The typologies in (i)–(iv) reflect different steps in the typologist’s work on a linguistic phenomenon, from selecting a domain to work upon to reaching abstract generalizations across this domain. We may refer to all four as TYPOLOGIES OF LINGUISTIC PHENOMENA or PHENOMENON TYPOLOGIES. Each of these four meta-types of typologies may in turn be reflected in TYPOLOGIES OF LANGUAGES. As a typology of a linguistic phenomenon consists of a set of types, one might categorize languages according to which of these types a given language displays. This correlation of phenomenon typology and language typology may be found for all four points in (i)–(iv). From a typology of past tense (point (i)) may be extracted a typology of languages with or without past tense, or languages with or without perfect tense, etc. From a typology of negation (point (ii)) may be extracted a typology of languages with particle negation vs. languages with affixal negation, etc. From point (iii) may likewise be extracted a typology of languages with head–dependent order vs. languages with dependent–head order, etc., and from point (iv) a typology of languages where perfects have developed from X vs. languages where they have developed from Y. It should be added that a typology of a linguistic phenomenon need not necessarily lead to a typology of languages. It is not always the case that the types of a given phenomenon typology tend to exclude each other within languages, or that languages tend to favour one particular phenomenon type. A typology of functional categories, i.e. point (i) above, may reach the extreme point in which the types a priori are expected to exist in all languages, e.g. Vendler’s (1957) typology of event types (activities, accomplishments, achievements and states). (vi) A TYPOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AREAS. For each typology of languages in (v), one may check whether the typology corresponds to sets of geographical areas, each of which display a clustering of languages belonging to one of the types in (v), e.g. languages with compulsory past tense marking tend to cluster in the non-Oriental Eurasia, Northern Africa, Australia and Northern South America, while languages without past tense marking tend to cluster in North America, Southern South America, Oriental Asia, etc. However, a typology of languages Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 26 Sep 2021 at 08:03:35, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 78 P AL˚ KRISTIAN ERIKSEN & CAMILLA WIDE need not lead to a typology of language areas, i.e. one could imagine the situation that a given phenomenon type is favoured by individual languages, but that these languages would not necessarily be clustered together in language areas. We do not have any examples of such a case though, and leave the verification of its existence for future research. In addition to the above list, the interpretation of ‘typology’ as a term in a given linguistic discussion also depends on whether it refers to MACRO-TYPOLOGY or MICRO- TYPOLOGY. Macro-typology is the classical understanding of linguistic typology, in which the global set of languages is used as the working domain, i.e. where data for research are provided through a statistically representative sample of languages from the entire world. Micro-typology uses the same working methods as macro-typology (e.g. steps (i)–(vi) above), but applies them on a restricted geographical area.
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