The Adoption and Integration of Loanwords in Swedish

This book is a linguistic trip down the history of the Swedish language, focusing on the interrelatedness of language and society, starting from the earliest attestations of the runic inscriptions in Scandinavia, all the way through contemporary Swedish. It is a complete publication of my PhD thesis, entitled “The Adoption and Integration of Loanwords in Swedish”, defended at University of Bucharest in September 2020.

During my years of studying and subsequently of teaching Swedish to different groups of people, I have always wondered upon the linguistic traces that various language contacts have had upon Swedish along history. Lexical and functional borrowings, changes in the structural domain of the language, the increasing social bilingualism at present – all of these factors have contributed to the shaping of the Swedish language as it is nowadays.

As a result, the book sets out to investigate the adoption and integration of lexical loanwords in Swedish in different historical periods, while also accounting for sociolinguistic factors such as contact-induced language change, language purism, as well as linguistic attitudes. Furthermore, the study attempts to reconcile the synchronic-diachronic dichotomy by drawing primarily on the principles of historical sociolinguistics.

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