Svensk språkforskning under 1900-talet

The development of Swedish linguistics during the 20th century reflects international development. The century started with focus on language history described according to the theory of sound laws. It is reasonable to call the period around the turn of the century the Golden Age of Nordic philology; characterized by the work of Adolf Noreen; Axel Kock and Elof Hellquist who clarified the basic development of Swedish and solved the etymologies of most Swedish words. Lexicography; onomastics and dialectology became Swedish specialties and were institutionalized. Around 1950 structuralism was introduced in Sweden; mainly by Bertil Malmberg who gained a chair in phonetics at Lund. Phonetics developed into a Swedish specialty by integrating technical aspects thanks to the work of Gunnar Fant. Noam Chomsky and generative grammar had a great influence in Sweden and Swedish syntax became an interesting field for young linguists who began publishing in English. Language learning research and psycholinguistics were also stimulated by generative grammar. Communication became a key concept for studies of interaction; dialogue and pragmatics. Computational linguistics made it possible to establish frequency dictionaries and large data bases for corpus linguistics. By the turn of the century 2000 the status of Swedish has been in question as the language seems to be threatened both by the involvement in EU and by the immigrant languages in Sweden. In a pessimistic perspective Swedish linguists will have to study the decline and fall of Swedish; in a more optimistic to study the survival of Swedish in a globalized world.