ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns Mainland Scandinavian, and considers the expression “Scandinavian languages” to refer to this typologically fairly consistent subgroup of the Nordic languages. The historical process has effected four standard languages in present-day Scandinavia: standard Danish; Bokmal, a standard based on both Old Norwegian and Old Danish; Nynorsk, a standard based on spoken Norwegian dialects; and standard Swedish. With respect to inflectional morphology, Scandinavian languages exhibit several different patterns for the organization of the relation between form and content. From an Indo-European perspective, the most striking feature of Scandinavian phonology is the presence of word accents. In reviewing Scandinavian child language acquisition research, the chapter focuses on issues that highlight the central goals of crosslinguistic acquisition theory and research. Within the domain of more advanced syntax, relative clauses in Scandinavian acquisition show a clearly precocious, though not error-free, development as compared to, for example, English or Turkish.
