Adolf Gotthard Noreen (13 March 1854 Östra Ämtervik,
Sunne MunicipalitySunne Municipality is a municipality in Värmland County in west central Sweden. Its seat is located in the town of Sunne.The present municipality was created in 1971 when the market town Sunne was amalgamated with Gräsmark and Lysvik.-Localities:*Lysvik*Rottneros*Sunne *Uddheden*Västra...
– 13 June 1925) was a
SwedishSweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe...
linguistLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
who served as a member of the
Swedish AcademyThe Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...
from 1919 until his death.
Noreen was born at
Värmland' is a historical province or landskap in the west of middle Sweden. It borders Västergötland, Dalsland, Dalarna, Västmanland and Närke. It is also bounded by Norway in the west. Its Latin name is Wermelandia; its English derivative is Wermland or similar variation. The origin of the name is...
. He became a student at
Uppsala UniversityUppsala University is a research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded as early as 1477, it is the oldest such institution in the Nordic countries, and for centuries has been one of Europe's most renowned seats of learning....
in 1871 and went on to complete his
doctorateA doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries represents the highest level of formal study or research in a given field. In some countries it also refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to practice in a specific profession . The best-known example...
there in 1877; he became a lecturer at the university in the same year. Noreen spent most of 1879 at the
University of LeipzigThe University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in Europe and the second-oldest university in Germany...
, the home of the
NeogrammarianThe Neogrammarians were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change...
school of linguistics - a school to which Noreen belonged for his entire literary life.
Adolf Gotthard Noreen (13 March 1854 Östra Ämtervik,
Sunne MunicipalitySunne Municipality is a municipality in Värmland County in west central Sweden. Its seat is located in the town of Sunne.The present municipality was created in 1971 when the market town Sunne was amalgamated with Gräsmark and Lysvik.-Localities:*Lysvik*Rottneros*Sunne *Uddheden*Västra...
– 13 June 1925) was a
SwedishSweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe...
linguistLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
who served as a member of the
Swedish AcademyThe Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...
from 1919 until his death.
Biography
Noreen was born at
Värmland' is a historical province or landskap in the west of middle Sweden. It borders Västergötland, Dalsland, Dalarna, Västmanland and Närke. It is also bounded by Norway in the west. Its Latin name is Wermelandia; its English derivative is Wermland or similar variation. The origin of the name is...
. He became a student at
Uppsala UniversityUppsala University is a research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded as early as 1477, it is the oldest such institution in the Nordic countries, and for centuries has been one of Europe's most renowned seats of learning....
in 1871 and went on to complete his
doctorateA doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries represents the highest level of formal study or research in a given field. In some countries it also refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to practice in a specific profession . The best-known example...
there in 1877; he became a lecturer at the university in the same year. Noreen spent most of 1879 at the
University of LeipzigThe University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in Europe and the second-oldest university in Germany...
, the home of the
NeogrammarianThe Neogrammarians were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change...
school of linguistics - a school to which Noreen belonged for his entire literary life. Whilst in Leipzig, Noreen was taught
LithuanianLithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...
by
August LeskienAugust Leskien was a German linguist active in the field of comparative linguistics, particularly relating to the Baltic and Slavic languages.-Biography:...
, a pioneer of research into
sound lawsSound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
.
Much of Noreen's early output was focused on
Swedish dialectologySwedish dialects can be categorized into Traditional Dialects and Modern Dialects .-Traditional dialects:...
, primarily in his home province of Värmland and the neighbouring province of
Dalarna' is a historical province or landskap in central Sweden. English name forms established in literature are Dalecarlia and the Dales. Places involving the element Dalecarlia still exist in the United States....
. His work, which was the first in Sweden to utilise the findings of the Neogrammarians, remained influential in the field well into the 20th century. Noreen's academic focus in the 1880s shifted to the field of
historical linguisticsHistorical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
, primarily centred on the
Germanic languagesThe Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
. His grammars of
Old West NorseOld Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
and Old Swedish remain in use by scholars to the present day. In 1887 Noreen was named as the third Professor of Scandinavian languages at Uppsala University. Noreen devoted the last twenty years of his life to writing
Vårt språk (
Our Language), an ultimately unfinished work in which he outlines his view of the
Swedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the Åland islands. It is to a considerable extent mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to a lesser extent with Danish...
, its
grammarIn linguistics, grammar is the set of logical and structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology,...
,
phonologyPhonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system...
and
morphologyMorphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules...
. Noreen was elected to Seat 12 of the Swedish Academy in 1919, following the death of
Gustaf RetziusMagnus Gustaf Retzius was a Swedish physician and anatomist who dedicated a large part of his life to researching the histology of the sense organs and nervous system.-Biography:...
.
Works
- Fryksdalsmålets ljudlära (1877)
- Dalbymålet (1879)
- Fårömålet (1879)
- ‘Sam. Columbus’ En svensk ordeskötsel (with G. Stjernström; 1881)
- Svensk språklära (with E. Schwartz; 1881)
- Dalmålen (1881–83)
- Altislandische und altnorwegische Grammatik (1884)
- Utkast til föreläsningar i urgermansk ljudlära med huvudsakligt avseende på de nordiska språken (1888–90)
- Geschichte der germanischen Philologie (1891)
- Valda stycken af svenska författare 1526–1732 (with E. Meyer; 1893)
- Altschwedisches Lesebuch (1892–94)
- Spridda studier (1895)
- Altschwedische Grammatik mit Einschluss des Altgutnischen (1897)
- Vårt språk (1904–24)