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Sonja Dahlgren

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Alpine Laboratory of Phonetic Sciences, Visiting postdoctoral researcher

University of Helsinki, Department of Modern Languages, Post-Doc

Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, Clinical Audiology, Speech and Language Research Centre, Visiting postdoctoral researcher

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I am at the moment studying the contact linguistic situations of the different regional Koine Greek varieties. Partly connected to this, I am still also engaged with a phonetic typology, studying language-specific phonemic biases with ultrasound tongue imaging. One aspect of this study is how the phonemic biases may be affected in language contact.
I still continue to also work on the language contact between Roman Period Greek and Egyptian, focusing on the phonological transfer from Egyptian to L2 Greek and how it formed into a contact variety, Egyptian Greek. I am also more generally interested in phonological typology, sociophonetics, contact phonology and sound symbolism.

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Conference Presentations by Sonja Dahlgren

STUDYING LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC COARTICULATORY PATTERNS WITH TONGUE ULTRASOUND: THE CASE OF FINNISH

A (morpho)phonological typology of demonstratives: A case study in sound symbolism

Egyptian Greek: A contact variety

Paper in Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics Winter Meeting, New York, 4-5 January 2019

PROSODIC MARKING OF CERTAINTY CONTRASTS: The case of Finnish modal and evidential particles

Poster for Proslang workshop, NZ, 2018

We discuss Finnish modal/evidential particles and show their meaning is determined not only by th... more We discuss Finnish modal/evidential particles and show their meaning is determined not only by their lexical contents but also by stress (see also Estellés-Arguedas 2015) and polarity (negation vs. affirmation). Particles of certainty maintain their meaning in negation, while the meaning of the uncertainty/possibility particles may be modified by stress in negation. We will also discuss the rationale behind these differences.

ACT OF THE SCRIBE Transmitting Linguistic Knowledge and Scribal Practices in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

by Sonja Dahlgren and Marja Vierros

Our aim is to provide a linguistic analysis of the types of variation present in the documentary ... more Our aim is to provide a linguistic analysis of the types of variation present in the documentary papyri. We produce analysis of e.g. Egyptian influence on the use of Greek in Egypt, and the type of variation existant in the Latin use. We study both macro-level variation in terms of treating Egyptian Greek as a contact variety, and micro-level in studying idiolectic language use as part of a wider tendency. We make extensive use of digital technologies in our analyses. We are annotating texts morpho-syntactically, and as a later development, we also have a phoneme-based search engine. These tools enable us to analyse larger quantities of documents in a relatively short time, providing us with knowledge of general tendencies in language variation and change.

Selkokieltä S2-oppijan näkökulmasta

Egyptian Greek: A contact variety (?)

Evidence for Coptic vowel reduction from L2 Greek usage

Outcome of long-term language contact: towards a definition of an Egyptian Greek variant (poster)

Towards a (morpho)phonological typology of demonstratives: iconicity or something else? (poster)

by Sonja Dahlgren and Seppo Kittilä

This paper proposes a (morpho)phonological typology of proximal and distal demonstratives. The fo... more

Egyptian transfer elements in the Greek of narmuthis ostraka

Confusion of tense and modality? Impact of L1 phonological transfer on verb semantics (poster)

by Sonja Dahlgren and Martti Leiwo

Egyptian Transfer in the Greek of Roman Period Egyptian Scribes (poster)

Papers by Sonja Dahlgren

Language-specific coarticulatory patterns: a comparative study of Arabic and Spanish

by Sonja Dahlgren and Michael Ramsammy

Dahlgren, S., Ramsammy M. and Scobbie J.M. (2024). Language-specific coarticulatory patterns: a comparative study of Arabic and Spanish. , 2024

Background. We investigate a hypothesis for languages to be phonologically categorised based on d... more Background. We investigate a hypothesis for languages to be phonologically categorised based on direction of coarticulation: i.e. whether coarticulation mainly occurs from consonant to vowel (C-to-V) or from vowel to consonant (V-to-C), and whether this is connected to language-specific phonological contrasts. We report preliminary findings from an Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) study on Arabic and Spanish focusing on the velar stop /k/. Previous studies highlight language-specific preferences for the direction of coarticulation: e.g. consonant to vowel (Caucasian) versus vowel to consonant (English; Greek). Furthermore, in an acoustic study of V1CV2 utterances, it was noticed that English and Swedish allow the articulators to start moving toward the configuration of V2 at the acoustic end of V1 before the consonant occlusion, while Russian did not. Our initial hypothesis was that coarticulatory preferences mainly result from the ratio between vowels and consonants in the phoneme inventory: i.e. languages with a high number of consonantal contrasts should show different coarticulatory patterns from languages with fewer phonemic consonants. With this in mind, Arabic and Spanish form a good comparative pair: Modern Standard Arabic has 39 consonants and 3 vowel qualities that also admit a quantity contrast. Spanish has a smaller system, comprising 17-19 consonants (dialect dependently) and 5 vowel qualities.

Miehekkyyden ilmeneminen Medeian hahmossa (The manifestation of masculinity in the character of Medea)

Coptic Dictionary Online: shay, fay, hori

Outcome of long-term language contact : Transfer of Egyptian phonological features onto Greek in Graeco-Roman Egypt

In this work I have studied the language contact situation between Egyptian and Greek in Roman pe... more In this work I have studied the language contact situation between Egyptian and Greek in Roman period Egypt. I have analysed the language use of a corpus written by Egyptian scribe apprentices, OGN I (Ostraca greci da Narmuthis), rich with nonstandard variation due to the imperfect Greek learning of the young scribes. I concentrated on finding Egyptian phonological influence from the misspellings of the vowels that displayed variation atypical for native language writers. Among the nonstandard features were, for example, underdifferentiation of foreign phonemes, the reduction of word-final vowels, allophonic variation that matched Coptic prosodic rules, and coarticulation of consonants on vowels. All of these linguistic characteristics can be found also in the near-phonetic nonstandard spellings of Greek loanwords in Coptic, which I used as parallel reference material. Studying the similarly phonetically-based orthographic variants in Arabic loanwords in Coptic from a later period g...

Variation within and among Writing Systems: Concepts and Methods in the Analysis of Ancient Written Documents. Edited by Paola Cotticelli-Kurras – Alfredo Rizza. LautSchriftSprache / ScriptandSound 1. Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden 2017. [Book review]

Arctos – Acta Philologica Fennica, 2020

Maahanmuuttajille suunnatun neuvontamateriaalin sisältökartoitus

Language contact in historical documents: the identification and co-occurrence of Egyptian transfer features in Greek documentary papyri

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2022

The Egyptian-Greek contact situation has lasted almost a thousand years and many documents have b... more The Egyptian-Greek contact situation has lasted almost a thousand years and many documents have been preserved to us from this period. In this paper, we apply a new quantitative approach to this rich corpus of documentary papyri to map the relationships between the linguistic variables (the variant spellings) and several non-linguistic variables. A multidimensional scaling of the co-occurrences of the linguistic variables shows that there is a strong association between most of the Greek variant spellings that can be explained by Egyptian phonological transfer, while others do not typically co-occur with them. Several new linguistic variables not yet connected to Egyptian phonological transfer also show a strong relation with the first group of features, some of them representing the same phonological transfer processes. A comparison of the contexts in which these variables are used allows us to further substantiate this observation: several of the previously and newly Egyptian-associated variables turn out to have a strong correlation with bilingual Egyptian-Greek documents or occur in Egyptian dominated environments. The spelling variants are chronologically dependent and different features are typically associated with different historical periods illustrating changes taking place in the Egyptian Greek contact variety over time. A multiple correspondence analysis shows that the variables strongly interact, illustrating the importance of a multifactorial approach combining various linguistic and non-linguistic factors.

STUDYING LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC COARTICULATORY PATTERNS WITH TONGUE ULTRASOUND: THE CASE OF FINNISH

A (morpho)phonological typology of demonstratives: A case study in sound symbolism

Egyptian Greek: A contact variety

Paper in Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics Winter Meeting, New York, 4-5 January 2019

PROSODIC MARKING OF CERTAINTY CONTRASTS: The case of Finnish modal and evidential particles

Poster for Proslang workshop, NZ, 2018

We discuss Finnish modal/evidential particles and show their meaning is determined not only by th... more We discuss Finnish modal/evidential particles and show their meaning is determined not only by their lexical contents but also by stress (see also Estellés-Arguedas 2015) and polarity (negation vs. affirmation). Particles of certainty maintain their meaning in negation, while the meaning of the uncertainty/possibility particles may be modified by stress in negation. We will also discuss the rationale behind these differences.

ACT OF THE SCRIBE Transmitting Linguistic Knowledge and Scribal Practices in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

by Sonja Dahlgren and Marja Vierros

Our aim is to provide a linguistic analysis of the types of variation present in the documentary ... more Our aim is to provide a linguistic analysis of the types of variation present in the documentary papyri. We produce analysis of e.g. Egyptian influence on the use of Greek in Egypt, and the type of variation existant in the Latin use. We study both macro-level variation in terms of treating Egyptian Greek as a contact variety, and micro-level in studying idiolectic language use as part of a wider tendency. We make extensive use of digital technologies in our analyses. We are annotating texts morpho-syntactically, and as a later development, we also have a phoneme-based search engine. These tools enable us to analyse larger quantities of documents in a relatively short time, providing us with knowledge of general tendencies in language variation and change.

Selkokieltä S2-oppijan näkökulmasta

Egyptian Greek: A contact variety (?)

Evidence for Coptic vowel reduction from L2 Greek usage

Outcome of long-term language contact: towards a definition of an Egyptian Greek variant (poster)

Towards a (morpho)phonological typology of demonstratives: iconicity or something else? (poster)

by Sonja Dahlgren and Seppo Kittilä

This paper proposes a (morpho)phonological typology of proximal and distal demonstratives. The fo... more

Egyptian transfer elements in the Greek of narmuthis ostraka

Confusion of tense and modality? Impact of L1 phonological transfer on verb semantics (poster)

by Sonja Dahlgren and Martti Leiwo

Egyptian Transfer in the Greek of Roman Period Egyptian Scribes (poster)

Language-specific coarticulatory patterns: a comparative study of Arabic and Spanish

by Sonja Dahlgren and Michael Ramsammy

Dahlgren, S., Ramsammy M. and Scobbie J.M. (2024). Language-specific coarticulatory patterns: a comparative study of Arabic and Spanish. , 2024

Background. We investigate a hypothesis for languages to be phonologically categorised based on d... more Background. We investigate a hypothesis for languages to be phonologically categorised based on direction of coarticulation: i.e. whether coarticulation mainly occurs from consonant to vowel (C-to-V) or from vowel to consonant (V-to-C), and whether this is connected to language-specific phonological contrasts. We report preliminary findings from an Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) study on Arabic and Spanish focusing on the velar stop /k/. Previous studies highlight language-specific preferences for the direction of coarticulation: e.g. consonant to vowel (Caucasian) versus vowel to consonant (English; Greek). Furthermore, in an acoustic study of V1CV2 utterances, it was noticed that English and Swedish allow the articulators to start moving toward the configuration of V2 at the acoustic end of V1 before the consonant occlusion, while Russian did not. Our initial hypothesis was that coarticulatory preferences mainly result from the ratio between vowels and consonants in the phoneme inventory: i.e. languages with a high number of consonantal contrasts should show different coarticulatory patterns from languages with fewer phonemic consonants. With this in mind, Arabic and Spanish form a good comparative pair: Modern Standard Arabic has 39 consonants and 3 vowel qualities that also admit a quantity contrast. Spanish has a smaller system, comprising 17-19 consonants (dialect dependently) and 5 vowel qualities.

Miehekkyyden ilmeneminen Medeian hahmossa (The manifestation of masculinity in the character of Medea)

Coptic Dictionary Online: shay, fay, hori

Outcome of long-term language contact : Transfer of Egyptian phonological features onto Greek in Graeco-Roman Egypt

In this work I have studied the language contact situation between Egyptian and Greek in Roman pe... more In this work I have studied the language contact situation between Egyptian and Greek in Roman period Egypt. I have analysed the language use of a corpus written by Egyptian scribe apprentices, OGN I (Ostraca greci da Narmuthis), rich with nonstandard variation due to the imperfect Greek learning of the young scribes. I concentrated on finding Egyptian phonological influence from the misspellings of the vowels that displayed variation atypical for native language writers. Among the nonstandard features were, for example, underdifferentiation of foreign phonemes, the reduction of word-final vowels, allophonic variation that matched Coptic prosodic rules, and coarticulation of consonants on vowels. All of these linguistic characteristics can be found also in the near-phonetic nonstandard spellings of Greek loanwords in Coptic, which I used as parallel reference material. Studying the similarly phonetically-based orthographic variants in Arabic loanwords in Coptic from a later period g...

Variation within and among Writing Systems: Concepts and Methods in the Analysis of Ancient Written Documents. Edited by Paola Cotticelli-Kurras – Alfredo Rizza. LautSchriftSprache / ScriptandSound 1. Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden 2017. [Book review]

Arctos – Acta Philologica Fennica, 2020

Maahanmuuttajille suunnatun neuvontamateriaalin sisältökartoitus

Language contact in historical documents: the identification and co-occurrence of Egyptian transfer features in Greek documentary papyri

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2022

The Egyptian-Greek contact situation has lasted almost a thousand years and many documents have b... more The Egyptian-Greek contact situation has lasted almost a thousand years and many documents have been preserved to us from this period. In this paper, we apply a new quantitative approach to this rich corpus of documentary papyri to map the relationships between the linguistic variables (the variant spellings) and several non-linguistic variables. A multidimensional scaling of the co-occurrences of the linguistic variables shows that there is a strong association between most of the Greek variant spellings that can be explained by Egyptian phonological transfer, while others do not typically co-occur with them. Several new linguistic variables not yet connected to Egyptian phonological transfer also show a strong relation with the first group of features, some of them representing the same phonological transfer processes. A comparison of the contexts in which these variables are used allows us to further substantiate this observation: several of the previously and newly Egyptian-associated variables turn out to have a strong correlation with bilingual Egyptian-Greek documents or occur in Egyptian dominated environments. The spelling variants are chronologically dependent and different features are typically associated with different historical periods illustrating changes taking place in the Egyptian Greek contact variety over time. A multiple correspondence analysis shows that the variables strongly interact, illustrating the importance of a multifactorial approach combining various linguistic and non-linguistic factors.

Egyptian Greek: A Contact Variety

Ancient Indo-European Languages between Linguistics and Philology, 2022

In this article I explore the classification of Greek in Roman Egypt (1st century CE onward) as a... more In this article I explore the classification of Greek in Roman Egypt (1st century CE onward) as a contact variety, Egyptian Greek, which differed from contemporary standard Greek in several, contact-induced respects. I will argue that transfer from Egyptian-Coptic includes phonetic, phonological and morphological transfer, and is similar in nature with other conquest-related contact varieties such as Indian English, Irish and Scottish varieties of English and Finland Swedish.

Papers on Ancient Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the Ninth International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL9) 30 August – 1 September 2018, Helsinki

Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, 2021

This volume is a collection of twenty-nine papers that had their preliminary presentation at the ... more This volume is a collection of twenty-nine papers that had their preliminary presentation at the 9th International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL9) that took place in Helsinki 28 August – 1 September, 2018. Thus they show exciting new lines of research in the field of Ancient Greek linguistics, where many approaches take advantage of current linguistic methods and theories. The Helsinki colloquium had two themes: 1) Language contact between Greek and other languages and 2) Linguistic research on original documents and manuscripts. The majority of the papers in this volume focus on these themes, many of them on both. However, Ancient Greek linguistic research from all angles, synchronically as well as diachronically studied, was welcomed. Consequently, all levels and many topics regarding language analysis – morphology, syntax, modality discourse analysis, semantics as well as pragmatics - were presented in the contributions by scholars ranging from those beginning ...

Coptic Dictionary Online: shay, fay, hori

Greek Influence on Egyptian-Coptic: Contact-Induced Change in an Ancient African Language, by Eitan Grossman, Peter Dils, Tonio Sebastian Richter, and Wolfgang Schenkel, (eds.)

Journal of Greek Linguistics

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC license at ... more

Outcome of language contact

Journal of Greek Linguistics

This summary presents the main findings of my Ph.D. dissertation (University of Helsinki) on the ... more

SELKOKIELTÄ S2-OPPIJALLE -KAIKILLE SELVIÄ HALLINNOLLISIA TEKSTEJÄ (Easy language for the L2 Finnish learner - Easy administrative texts for all)

Puhe ja kieli 4(2019), 2020

Tässä artikkelissa tutkin maahanmuuttajille suunnatun viranomaistiedon antamista selkokielisessä ... more Tässä artikkelissa tutkin maahanmuuttajille suunnatun viranomaistiedon antamista selkokielisessä muodossa. Aineistoni on peräisin selkomukautetun Perustietoa Suomesta -oppaan valmisteluprosessista, jossa S2-oppijat testasivat oppaaseen tulevien tekstien rakenteita. Opas suunniteltiin maahanmuuttajille, ja siihen koottiin tarpeellista tietoa Suomen hallinnosta ja yhteiskunnasta. Testatessa selvisi, että monet äidinkielisille käyttäjille tarkoitetut selkokielen rakenteet ovat maahanmuuttajataustaisille koelukijoille vaikeita, ja että S2-oppijat tarvitsevat tietyiltä osin omanlaistaan selkokieltä. Kielen rakenteisiin liittyvien haasteiden lisäksi tutkimuksessa nousi esiin muitakin viranomaistiedon jakamiseen liittyviä kysymyksiä, kuten kulttuurikohtaisen sanaston väärinymmärtäminen.

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In this article I study administrative information given to immigrants that is written in an easy format. The material I use comes from the working process of the Life in Finland guide, which has been translated into easy Finnish. The structures of the texts planned for the guide, designed for immigrants and containing essential information on the Finnish government and society, were tested by second language (L2) Finnish learners. Testing revealed that many of the easy language structures designed for native language (L1) users were difficult for test readers with an L2/immigrant background. It became obvious that to some extent, L2 Finnish learners need an easy language form of their own. In addition to the challenges related to linguistic structures, the study also raised questions related to the distribution of administrative information; one of which was the misunderstanding of culture-specific vocabulary.

Confusion of mood or phoneme? The impact of L1 phonology on verb semantics (pre publication)

by Sonja Dahlgren and Martti Leiwo

The Greek texts from Egypt show extensive nonstandard vowel production, which could cause inadver... more The Greek texts from Egypt show extensive nonstandard vowel production, which could cause inadvertent confusion in e.g. Greek mood or case endings. This has previously been seen as evidence of a bad command of Greek, either because of internal phonological change or due to imperfect knowledge of Greek. On closer look numerous similarities to the nonstandard vowel production in Greek texts can also be found in native Egyptian texts. Greek loanwords in Coptic are treated according to Coptic phonological rules and show nonstandard vowel usage of the same nature that is present in Greek in some sociolects. The nonstandard spellings present evidence of underdifferentiation of Greek phonemes as well as transfer elements of the Egyptian prosodic system. The vowel usage is examined within the framework of L2WS (second language writing systems) studies, and evidence for the coarticulatory effect of the consonants on the vowels' quality is drawn from the field of articulatory phonetics.

The System of Coptic vowel reduction: Evidence from L2 Greek usage

The dynamics of vowel reduction and loss: phonetic mechanisms and outcomes for phonology and morphology. Italian Journal of Linguistics., 2020

In this paper I study Coptic vowel reduction through L2 Greek misspellings in Egypt from the Roma... more In this paper I study Coptic vowel reduction through L2 Greek misspellings in Egypt from the Roman period onwards. Greek was the language of the government with mostly Egyptian scribes. In many cases, it is obvious that the nonstandard vowel replacements in Greek result from the Coptic tendency to reduce the quality of unstressed vowels to schwa. L2 Greek misspellings offer a glimpse into the system of vowel reduction in Coptic, evidence of which is not easily obtained language-internally. The misspellings are congruent with phoneme distribution in Coptic and can be verified by similar misspellings of Greek loanwords in native Coptic texts. Observed phenomena are the reduction of unstressed word-final vowels to schwa, stress-conditioned allophonic variation in round vowels, and consonant-to-vowel coarticulation word-medially.

Dissertation Summaries/Outcome of language contact: Transfer of Egyptian phonological features onto Greek in Graeco-Roman Egypt (pre publication)

This summary presents the main findings of my Ph.D. dissertation (University of Helsinki) on the ... more

Egyptian transfer elements in the Greek of Narmouthis ostraka

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 27TH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF PAPYROLOGY

Towards a definition of an Egyptian Greek

This paper has originally been published in Papers in Historical Phonology. The official version,... more

Snagarilla lihikset loppu: symppis hevari sai kilarin

by Sonja Dahlgren and Seppo Kittilä

S uomen johtimet -is ja -ari ovat puhekielessä hyvin tyypillisiä sanoja lyhentäviä johtimia eli l... more S uomen johtimet -is ja -ari ovat puhekielessä hyvin tyypillisiä sanoja lyhentäviä johtimia eli lyhennejohtimia. Monista suomen sanoista voidaan muodostaa lyhenne käyttämällä jompaakumpaa johdinta. Lyhenteet ovatkin puhekielessä tyypillinen tehokeino värittää puhetta ja suurin osa meistä käyttää niitä, usein ehkä jopa tiedostamattaan. Puhekielisissä nettikommenteissa ja tekstiviesteissä on täysin mahdollista ja jopa tyypillistä esimerkiksi ostaa lihiksiä Itiksen Sittarista tai lähettää tekstareita bestikselleen. Luonnollisesti suomessa on myös muita tapoja lyhentää sanoja, kuten esimerkiksi sanat tietsikka, jäde ja Lintsi osoittavat, mutta näitä ei käsitellä tässä lyhyessä katsauksessa, koska ne edustavat suhteellisen pientä joukkoa sanoja huomattavasti yleisempien -is-ja -ari -päätteillä muodostettavien lyhenteiden lisäksi.

Perustietoa Suomesta (Life in Finland)

Perusopas maahanmuuttajille. Selkokielinen toteutus Sonja Dahlgren. Basic information of Finla... more

Act of the Scribe: Transmitting Linguistic Knowledge and Scribal Practices in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

by Marja Vierros, Martti Leiwo, and Sonja Dahlgren

Project website

PAPERS ON ANCIENT GREEK LINGUISTICS (Edited by M. Leiwo, M. Vierros and S. Dahlgren)

by Marja Vierros, Sonja Dahlgren, and Martti Leiwo

Papers on Ancient Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the Ninth International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL 9) 30 August – 1 September 2018, Helsinki. Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 139. Helsinki., 2020

Outcome of long-term language contact

Studying Greek phonology in Egypt

Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri (PapyG(r)eek) Opening Colloquium, 7-8 June 2018

Results of Egyptian-Greek language contact The Egyptian phonological features behind Greek misspellings

Invited talk at Humboldt University, Berlin

Greek Influence on Egyptian Coptic

Journal of Greek Linguistics, 2018

Book review: Eitan Grossman, Peter Dils, Tonio Sebastian Richter & Wolfgang Schenkel (eds.), 201... more