LANGUAGE CONTACT AND LANGUAGE CHANGE: Impact on the languages of the Nordic countries

In settings where there is widespread language contact, an expected outcome is language borrowing and language change. In the Nordic countries, a high level of unidirectional borrowing from English is the result of long-term contact between the national languages and English. This phenomenon has given rise to a sizable amount of research on how open the various language communities of the Nordic languages are to English, who the main users of English are, and attitudes toward English and English borrowings. This chapter offers an overview of this research at the national level and as comparisons across the Nordic nation-states, presenting a transnational overview of the integration of English-sourced linguistic material into the languages of the Nordic countries. Of particular interest is evidence of the integration of English loanwords grammatically, as well as the social and interactive adaptation of the borrowed forms.