With increased lexical influence and general English competence among Norwegian language users, the association of the suffix -s with the category of plural appears to be expanding. This article explores the occurrence and productivity of non-possessive -s in contemporary Norwegian, a feature which incorporates several phenomena. Our aim is to chart the lexico-grammatical categories instantiated by this morpho-phonological segment in light of the previous literature on Anglicisms in Norwegian and on the basis of empirical evidence from present-day language use. The article presents a corpus-based survey of categories where non-possessive -s occurs (i) as the plural marker of Anglicisms, e.g. drinks; (ii) in colloquialisms such as dritings ‘dead drunk’ – a combination of a domestic noun and English (or Norwegian) -ing + non-possessive -s reanalysed into an adjectival stem; (iii) in nouns like en caps ‘a (baseball) cap’, where it has lost its plurality marking function and become part of the lexical stem; and (iv) sporadically as a plurality marker of domestic or non-English words, e.g. temas. The variability in presence vs. absence of -s is further explored in four case studies dedicated to different stages of borrowing.

It has been suggested that second languages and translated languages are constrained by an interplay of several linguistic systems. This paper reports on a data-driven quantitative study on constrained Finnish. We detect linguistic phenomena that distinguish constrained from non-constrained Finnish across constrained varieties, first/source languages, and registers. Implementing a two-phase method, we first detect key quantitative differences of syntactically defined POS bigrams between each variety-, language-pair- and register-specific constrained dataset and its non-constrained counterpart, using Boruta feature selection. We then use the results as variables in a Multi-dimensional Analysis. The results show that both nominal complexity and verbal/clausal complexity distinguish constrained from non-constrained Finnish. These differences interact with both type of constraint and register: the constrained varieties are less sensitive to register differences, and this tendency is more pronounced in learner Finnish than in translated Finnish. Leaving out any of these variables from the analysis would blur our view of this multi-faceted phenomenon.

This paper investigates how 492 of the largest companies in Norway comply with the language requirement of the Norwegian Accounting Act Article 3-4. The results show that 36% of the companies presented their financial statements in Norwegian only, 45% in one or more language(s) in addition to Norwegian, while 19% had been granted dispensation and presented statements in English-only. The company’s ownership, use of English as a corporate language, and industry affiliation were the three most commonly mentioned reasons for dispensation, but the findings show significant differences between industry sectors in terms of language choice. The study contributes to corporate law research by examining the interpretation and application of the Norwegian Accounting Act by the Norwegian Directorate of Taxes; to sociolinguistics by shedding new light on the concepts of domain loss and diglossia; and to language-sensitive research in international business by analysing language use in Norwegian companies.

In this study, we present an analysis of gender assignment tendencies in Jamtlandic, a language variety of Sweden, using a word list of 1029 items obtained from fieldwork. Most research on gender assignment in the Scandinavian languages focuses on the standard languages (Steinmetz 1985; Källström 1996; Trosterud 2001, 2006) and Norwegian dialects (Enger 2011, Kvinlaug 2011, Enger & Corbett 2012). However, gender assignment principles for Swedish dialects have not previously been researched. We find generalizations based on semantic, morphological, and phonological principles. Some of the principles apply more consistently than others, some ‘win’ in competition with other principles; a multinomial logistic regression analysis provides a statistical foundation for evaluating the principles. The strongest tendencies are those based on biological sex, plural inflection, derivational suffixes, and some phonological sequences. Weaker tendencies include non-core semantic tendencies and other phonological sequences. Gender assignment in modern loanwords differs from the overall material, with a larger proportion of nouns assigned masculine gender.