Intensifiers are described in several recent articles as unstable vocabulary elements. This article presents an investigation of intensifiers of adjectives in four Norwegian corpora of speech language and two of written language, which shows that some intensifiers are rapidly increasing in use and others declining. An adjectival intensifier does strengthen or underline the meaning of the adjective, but is also an important mean to show the speaker’s opinions or attitude to what is described. The investigation shows to which degree the use of such intensifiers is changed in modern Norwegian spoken language according to some social variables, and gives a brief discussion of whether changes in use results in grammaticalization of the most frequent intensifiers or just show changes in lexical popularity.

Denne artikkelen er en introduksjon til Leksikografisk bokmålskorpus (LBK). Vi starter med en historisk oversikt over ordboksarbeid som er utført for norsk språk, og forklarer bakgrunnen for at LBK ble bygd opp på den måten det ble. Deretter gir vi en oversikt over innholdet i korpuset, før vi til slutt viser hvordan man kan søke i korpuset ved hjelp av korpussøkeverktøyet Glossa.

This article documents the increasing use of the English curse word fuck worldwide, as well as its degree of adaption into the host language, its syntactic function, and its meaning and its strength as taboo. Comparing the use of fuck with a special focus on the Nordic countries (Norway, Denmark, and Iceland) with its use in Eurasia and Africa (with different alphabets, namely Cyrillic in Russia, Devanāgarī in India and Ge’ez script in Ethiopia), we found some similar developmental patterns, but also differences, for example to what degree the English loan word has replaced local curses and in what ways among social groups within a country. Comparing the terms used for the same concept was challenging because some countries have better text corpora and more research on written languages and especially on taboos, and those without such resources required additional minor investigations for a baseline. Findings revealed that fuck has spread worldwide from English, and it is commonly used in Nordic languages today. In Russian fuck is also adopted into the heritage language to a relatively high degree, and it has further gained importance in the vocabulary of India, where English has become the most used language by the higher and middle classes, but less so by lower classes. In contrast, the study of Amharic language in Ethiopia shows that the f-word is rarely used at all, and only by youngsters. We found a pattern starting from the outer North with Icelandic having adapted and adopted the word fuck the most, a slight decline in use in Norwegian and Danish, with less adaption and use in Russian, even less in Indian-English or Hindi, and being more or less absent in the African language Amharic. Formally though it is used conceptually both in Hindi and Amharic.