Anne-Line Graedler

Foreign influence on the written language in the Nordic language communities

Abstract The article presents aspects of import words in the written languages of the Nordic countries, based on newspaper corpora from 1975 and 2000. Remarkably, only 2–4 percent of the words in any language occur with unequivocal signs of morphological non-adaptation. The frequency of import words ranges from 17 to 110 per 10,000 words running text, and the proportion of orthographically adapted words from 7–48 percent. Status as majority or minority language also seems to be of relevance, as do relative geographical position within the region, and language structural features.