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Fabian Heffermehl, researcher at the University of Oslo, reviews The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia: Language, Fiction and Fantasy in Modern Russia edited by Mikhail Suslov and Per Arne Bodin.

Abstract in English: Crossing the Boundary into the Russian "Imagined Community". "Language", "Culture" and "Religion" in Russian Media Discourse on the Integration of ImmigrantsJussi Lassila reviews Christine Myrdahl Lukash' doctoral dissertation Crossing the Boundary into the Russian "Imagined Community". "Language", "Culture" and "Religion" in Russian Media Discourse on the Integration of Immigrants. The dissertation analyses how the Russian 'imagined community' is represented in the 2000–2015 Russian media discourse on the integration of immigrants, and the role of 'language', 'culture' and 'identity' in this respect. Also, it compares this media discourse with the presidential discourse of the same period.

This article discusses the "Critical period" in language acquisition – based on the theory that children are born with the natural ability to learn language; an ability that gradually fades or disappears. According to this theory, children who are not privy to normal language stimulation during childhood miss their chance to acquire a language "perfectly".Critical periods do not only exist in language, e.g. children and other young animals need to receive visual stimulation for their vision to develop. The beginning of this article considers difference in opportunities for research, and thereby the state of knowledge concerning the critical period in vision, compared to language acquisition. The difference is based mainly on two factors: on the one hand, animals have been studied to elucidate the critical period in vision – an option that linguists do not have – and, on the other, it is quite common for children to lack visual stimulation, i.e. due to cataracts. It is less common for children to grow up without language stimulation, although stories exist of children that, for one reason or another, were deprived of human interaction during childhood. The author uses this opportunity to provide an account of two such stories, in a more detailed fashion than would be necessary to define the critical period in language acquisition. These are also stories of violence and questionable work methods for the sake of science. This is followed by a discussion of deaf children as, in the past – as well as the present day – it was common for them not to receive appropriate language stimulation from the beginning, i.e. via the use of sign language. The examples are so many that late language acquisition by deaf children can shed light on the critical period in language acquisition.Many have discussed the critical period in language acquisition but emphasis is often placed on that which has remained unlearned. This article asks rather what can be learned and whether language structure can be established despite a late start for the language acquisition process.

Abstract: Language policy in Slovakia and the Czech Republic after 1993The establishment of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic in 1993 sparked challenges for language policy in the two new states. From a linguistic point of view, the Czech and Slovak languages are very similar but the language situations in the two countries differ: Slovakia is home to two sizable linguistic minorities (Hungarian and Romani), whereas Czechia houses several small minority languages. Applying Robert L. Cooper's and Joshua A. Fishman's analytical categories and focusing on the activities of national politicians and prominent linguists, this article examines status and corpus planning in the two countries. In Slovakia, politicians have engaged intensely in status planning, focused on legislating Slovak as a state language. The establishment of a state language opened for political interference in corpus planning. In Czechia, status planning started out from a liberal platform in the 1990s, and interest mainly focused on corpus planning. Hotly debated questions of corpus planning put Czech linguistic authorities on the defensive. Increasingly, adaptations to the charters and conventions of the European Council have co-shaped both countries' language policy. During the period analyzed here, Slovakia has seen the linguistic standardization of Rusyn and Romani, and linguists in both countries have advanced their theoretical understanding of corpus planning.

Julie Hansen, associate professor of Slavic languages at Uppsala University, reviews Aleksander Pushkin. Russia's Great Poet written by Erik Egeberg.

Boken Nationalism as an Argument in Contemporary Russia: Four Perspectives on Language in Action er Veera Laines ph.d.-avhandling som hun forsvarte ved Universitetet i Helsingfors i 2021. Den består av tre artikler, et bokkapittel og en lang og grundig innledningstekst. Alt i alt har Laine skrevet en solid, veldokumentert og teoretisk velfundert avhandling.
The book Nationalism as an Argument in Contemporary Russia: Four Perspectives on Language in Action is Vera Laine's PhD dissertation which she defended at the University of Helsinki in 2021. It contains three research articles, one book chapter and a long and thorough introductory part. All things considered, Laine has written a solid, well-documented and theoretically well-founded dissertation.

Abstract: Russia as Civilization: Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media, and AcademiaPål Kolstø (University of Oslo, Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages) reviews Russia as Civilization: Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media, and Academia, edited by Kåre Johan Mjør and Sanna Turoma (Routledge, 2020).

The astonishing range of writings about the social causes and consequences of the Icelandic 2008 financial crisis proffers a unique opportunity to analyse comparative-ly how scholars from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences deal with one and the same subject. How does the scholarly approach differ regarding the employment of theories, hypotheses, empirical data and concepts? Is the methodology of the humanities noticeably different from that of the social sciences? Did the boundaries of philosophy and related sciences change in times of crisis, momentarily or permanently?

The Icelandic-English parallel corpus MaCoCu-is-en 1.0 was built by crawling the ".is" internet top-level domain in 2021, extending the crawl dynamically to other domains as well. All the crawling process was carried out by the MaCoCu crawler (https://github.com/macocu/MaCoCu-crawler). Websites containing documents in both target languages were identified and processed using the tool Bitextor (https://github.com/bitextor/bitextor). Considerable efforts were devoted into cleaning the extracted text to provide a high-quality parallel corpus. This was achieved by removing boilerplate and near-duplicated paragraphs and documents that are not in one of the targeted languages. Document and segment alignment as implemented in Bitextor were carried out, and BicleanerAI (https://github.com/bitextor/bicleaner-ai) and Bifixer (https://github.com/bitextor/bifixer) were used for fixing, cleaning, and deduplicating the final version of the corpus. While the TXT format consists solely of pairs of source and target segments (one or several sentences), each segment pair in the TMX format is accompanied by the following metadata: - source and target document URL; - quality score as provided by the tool BicleanerAI; - translation direction identification: the source segment in each segment pair was identified by using a probabilistic model; - personal information identification ("biroamer-entities"): segments containing personal information are flagged, so final users of the corpus can decide whether to use these segments; - language variants: the language variant of English (British or American) was identified for every segment pair on document and domain level. Notice and take down: Should you consider that our data contains material that is owned by you and should therefore not be reproduced here, please: (1) Clearly identify yourself, with detailed contact data such as an address, telephone number or email address at which you can be contacted. (2) Clearly identify the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed. (3) Clearly identify the material that is claimed to be infringing and information reasonably sufficient in order to allow us to locate the material. (4) Please write to the contact person for this resource whose email is available in the full item record. We will comply with legitimate requests by removing the affected sources from the next release of the corpus. This action has received funding from the European Union's Connecting Europe Facility 2014-2020 - CEF Telecom, under Grant Agreement No. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2020/2278341. This communication reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

The Accommodation of Regional and Ethno-cultural Diversity in Ukraine är sprungen ur ett högaktuellt norskt-ukrainskt forskningsprojekt som innehåller mycket matnyttigt material för den som forskar om de senaste årens ukrainska språk- och regionpolitik.
The Accommodation of Regional and Ethno-cultural Diversity in Ukraine is the product of a timely Ukrainian–Norwegian research project. It presents materials and analyses very useful for researchers of Ukraine's language and regional policies of recent years.

Denna festskrift innehåller tio informativa artiklar, mest om Georgien, dess språk, historia och samhälle, men också om tjerkesserna och Tjetjenien i det ryska Nordkaukasus, samt om det armeniska folkmordet. De flesta artiklarna är skrivna av georgiska och svenska forskare som är eller varit knutna till forskningsplattformen The Russia and Caucasus Regional Research (RUCARR) vid Malmö universitet.
This Festschrift contains ten informative chapters, mainly about Georgia, its language, history and society, but also about the Circassians and Chechnya in the Russian North Caucasus, as well as the Armenian genocide. Most of the contributions are written by Georgian and Swedish scholars associated with the Russia and the Caucasus Regional Research (RUCARR) platform at Malmö University.

This paper discusses the history of the nouns gleðimaður, which is known from Old as well as Modern icelandic, and gleðikona which first occurs in an 18th-century source. Other nominal compounds for men and women that have gleði- as their first member are also introduced. The meaning of these words is compared, as is their usage, in order to test the claim that the words for men normally have a neutral meaning ('cheerful man, party animal') but the words for women have a pejorative meaning ('hussy, prostitute'). The nature of the changes in the history of the gleði-compounds is also discussed, e.g., to what extent borrowing from a foreign language has taken place. Lars-Gunnar Andersson's categorization of the so-called "ugliness" of words is used for a more detailed definition of the semantic changes. Finally, we touch on the wish to reclaim the word gleðikona that has been observed in the last decades, i.e., to revive the practically forgotten meaning 'cheerful woman, female party animal'.

In 2019, the Swedish government officially switched terminology from using the traditional endogenous term Vitryssland to the exogenous Belarus. Vitryssland (lit: White Russia) had been in use in the Swedish language since the 17th century, and the decision was neither easy nor swift. There was no consensus about the utility of the change, and significant opposition from linguists and editors against abandoning a term which had emerged and become established over centuries of contact. The debate preceding the switch was often shrill, led by activists and steeped in identity politics. In fact, controversies regarding what to call the country were nothing new, highlighting diverging visions of its geopolitical and cultural position between East and West. Discussions mirrored the far more emotional and polarized discussions among Belarusian nationalists in the 20th century, which at times became violent. Kryvia, Byelorussia, Greatlitva were but some of contenders. This article is an attempt to place discussions about the Swedish terminology in the larger context of history, memory, geopolitics and identity politics.

The article explores how the Russo–Norwegian espionage debacle involving former border inspector Frode Berg was collectively and fragmentarily narrated by Russian online commenters. Through a digital ethnographic case study of user-driven segments on the Russian-language Internet (RuNet) – notably Live Journal and RT comment sections – this article shows how online narratives about the case involved participatory production by heterogeneous, polyphonous constellations of users. Analysing Russian online comments as network narratives, the article examines how Norway (as well as NATO and the West more broadly) has been construed on RuNet, where propaganda is ubiquitous, and where trolls, bots, vatniki and 'everyone else' continuously clash. Commenters' discussions of the Berg case reflect Kremlin-controlled narratives of Norway as an ambiguous actor associated with a high degree of ambivalence, but network narratives also reveal tensions, inconsistencies and contestation of the Russian antagonist discourse on Norway. More broadly, the study highlights how interactive digital narrative can serve to expand our understanding not only of Russia's relationship with Norway, but also of Russian informational activities as such.

Alda Björk Valdimarsdóttir's book of poetry, We Who Are Blind and Nameless, was published in 2015. The first part of the book, titled "The course of signs", lays the groundwork for the conceptual basis of the work through five poems. These five
poems will be examined through close reading and scholarly materials from various sources, such as cognitive literary studies, philosophy, psychology, social studies and neurological research. There is particular focus on how the poems stimulate the imagination of readers and ruffle their feelings; there is a discussion on (conceptual) metaphors, irony, humor, paradox, geometrical shapes, enumeration, anaphora and, not least, silence which is a common theme in Alda's poetry and also defines the structure of her poems in various ways. This analysis shows how Alda convinces readers to think about the "course of signs" in both a narrow and wider context. She not only causes readers to think about the paradoxical interplay of silence and signs – and thus man's ingrained need to both speak and be silent – but also woman's position within her family/world history and the encroachment of man upon his own environment. Through clever humour and irony, Alda Björk shows how apathetic people often are when faced with signs; how without thinking they give themselves over to them, even though they have other options; how people contribute for the signs to be isolating instead of connecting us with each other – and how they misuse silence or are not able to make use of it.