In the present investigation we aim to determine to which degree various linguistic factors contribute to the intelligibility of Swedish words among Danes. We correlated the results of an experiment on word intelligibility with eleven linguistic factors and carried out logistic regression analyses. In the experiment, the intelligibility of 384 frequent Swedish words was tested among Danish listeners via the Internet. The choice of eleven linguistic factors was motivated by their contribution to intelligibility in earlier studies. The highest correlation was found in the negative correlation between word intelligibility and phonetic distances. Also word length, different syllable numbers, foreign sounds, neighbourhood density, word frequency, orthography, and the absence of the prosodic phenomenon of 'stød' in Swedish contribute significantly to intelligibility. Although the results thus show that linguistic factors contribute to the intelligibility of single words, the amount of explained variance was not very large (R 2 (Cox and Snell) = .16, R 2 (Nagelkerke) = .21) when compared with earlier studies which were based on aggregate intelligibility. Partly, the lower scores result from the logistic regression model used. It was necessary to use logistic regression in our study because the intelligibility scores were coded in a binary variable. Additionally, we attribute the lower correlation to the higher number of idiosyncrasies of single words compared with the aggregate intelligibility and linguistic distance used in earlier studies. Based on observations in the actual data from the intelligibility experiment, we suggest further steps to be taken to improve the predictability of word intelligibility.

We investigate the complexity of nominal plural allomorphy in ten Germanic languages from a contrastive and diachronic perspective. Focusing on one language family allows us to develop multidimensional criteria to measure morphological complexity and to compare different diachronical drifts. We introduce a three-step complexity metric, involving (1) a quantitative step, (2) a qualitative step, and (3) a validation step comparing the results from step (1) and (2) to actual language use. In this article, we apply the method’s two first steps to the plural allomorphy of our sample languages. Our criteria include for (1) the number of allomorphs and for (2) iconicity in form-meaning relationship, the basis of allomorph assignment, and the direction of determination between stem and suffix. Our approach reveals Faroese as the most complex language and English as the simplest one.

In the Germanic languages, gender and declension are two classification systems with a restricted functional load. Still, both persist in many languages, and in some of these languages they are even intimately interrelated, i.e. gender can be predicted based on declension, or declension can be predicted based on gender. Several Germanic languages and dialectal varieties of German are compared with respect to this link between gender and declension. Based on contrastive data, the interaction seems to depend on the level of complexity, i.e. the number of declensions and genders. When complexity decreases, the conditioning of both categorization systems is either more strongly interrelated (leading to parallelization in the most extreme cases), or gender and declension are dissociated and bound to new, more transparent conditioning factors. The developments are interpreted against the background of the hypothesis that gender and declension are used complementarily in profiling the number category: gender profiles the singular, whereas declension profiles the plural.

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In the present study we quantitatively examined similarly constructed samples of formal spoken Swedish and Dutch in order to compare the composition of the lexicons. Results showed that Swedish has many more loans than Dutch, namely 44.4% against 27.9%. Within the Swedish loans there is a large compartment of Low German (38.7%), whereas most loans in Dutch have a French origin (63.8%). The differences in terms of the number and distribution of loanwords between the lexical profiles of Swedish and Dutch appear to be stable, as they were attested both in the present study and in previous studies. They can be attributed to differences in the linguistic distances between source and borrowing languages and to differences in the intensity of the contacts.