David Karlander

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at Uppsala University

Sociolinguistics has an intricate relationship with the city. Cities have not only acted as sites of sociolinguistic research but have simultaneously provided tools and frameworks that have proven useful in this research. This heuristic mode has subsumed the object of language under a specific body of ideas, facts and arguments. Seen in an epistemo...

Semilingualism' is one of the most questionable theories produced in the language sciences. Yet, little is known about its origins. We present a critical account of the history of semilingualism, tracing its roots in the work of Nils Erik Hansegård, (1918-2002), inaugural chair of Sámi at Umeå University (1975-1979), who developed a theory of semil...

Esperantist radical Eugène Lanti (1879–1947) anticipated a total ‘unification’ of humankind, envisioning that national, linguistic, and social differences would soon give way to a global, stateless, monolingual, postcapitalist utopia. This vision was grounded in Lanti's understanding of history as teleological progress toward increased rationality,...

Brännstedt, Salö & Silow Kallenberg (eds.)

This introductory article opens the thematic issue Spaces of Upset in the Nordic Region. It introduces the contributions of the issue, outlines the concepts that unite them, and discusses the sociolinguistic area in which they are set: the Nordic region. Centering on Denmark, Finland and Sweden, the article offers an overview of some of the socioli...

Special Issue of International Journal of the Sociology of Language (275) https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ijsl/2022/275/html

This article presents an edited conversation between Kenneth Hyltenstam, Christopher Stroud, Linus Salö and David Karlander. Its main topic is the rise and consolidation of bilingualism research/multilingualism research as a demarcated subject area in Swedish academe. The article delves into this history via the professional, scholarly trajectories...

A sensitisation to the disciplinary past offers a way forward for sociolinguistic inquiry. Historicisation may add reflexive distance to our current concerns and debates. It may serve to detect, put into perspective and ease epistemological and ideational tensions. It is equally useful for determining the extent to which past ideas and practices li...

In this essay, David Karlander examines what happens when concepts developed by scholars of language circulate and become embedded in policies and law. In exploring how the distinction between a “language” and a “dialect” became encoded in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), Karlander examines the consequences when appl...

This paper discusses symbolic violence in sociolinguistic research on multilingualism. It revisits an archived recording of a group discussion between four boys about their chances of having sex with a female researcher. The data is rife with symbolic violence. Most obviously, the conversation enacted a hetero-sexist form of symbolic violence. This...

Spatially interested sociolinguistics has cared little about the semiotics of nonexistence. The present article argues that the field would benefit from deepening its interest in questions of erasure and relative absence. A case in point, as the article shows, is graffiti. By analysing some semiotic facets of the erasure of graffiti, the article br...

For half a century or more, semilingualism has been a controversial-much debated and much derided-idea. The present paper engages with some facets of this history. It traces the formation and early circulation in its context of origin: Sweden's nascent fields of bilingualism research and minority education. The paper analyzes semilingualism as a 't...

This article takes interest in reocentric thinking, as well as in the ways such thinking is brought to bear on research on language and social life. Reocentric thinking, understood as referential theories that treat words as standing for things, is pervasive throughout the history of (Western) linguistic thought. Yet, its manifestations in descript...

This article deals with the politics of classification in contemporary Sweden. It analyses the language political dispute that has developed over the language political regulation of O ̈vdalsk, a non-standard form of Scandinavian spoken in A ̈ lvdalen in northern central Sweden. The analysis focuses on the ways in which a discursive exchange over m...

Social agents often stake claims to the naming operations that are embedded in official discourse. The present article explores the metapragmatics of such investments. Drawing on post-Austinian theories of naming (Kripke, Harris, Bourdieu, Silverstein), the article analyses the contentious process of naming roads in a rural community in Sweden. In...

This article deals with mobile semiotics. First and foremost, it discusses mobility as a semiotic device. The analysis engages with backjumps, a genre of train graffiti that draws inventively on various forms of movement. The term backjump refers to any fairly elaborate graffiti piece painted on trains in traffic, notably during the trains’ extende...

This article deals with the symbolic and material formation of an authenticated register of Övdalsk - a Scandinavian local language - unfolding in a situated engagement with grammatical artefacts. Seeking to refine the often underspecified category of the indexically 'pre-shift,' 'traditional,' 'old' or, in some other way, temporally authenticated...