Mats Thelander

Sedan 1987 har jag vid Institutionen för nordiska språk i Uppsala innehaft professuren i svenska språket, särskilt nusvenska. I min forskning har jag intresserat mig för svenskans variation och förändring, främst inom stilhistoria och dialektsociologi. Jag är också road av standardiseringsfrågor och språkliga normkonflikter. Vid sidan av egen forskning har jag ägnat en hel del tid åt doktorandhandledning och utgivningsverksamhet. Jag har haft ledningsuppdrag både inom och utanför universitetet.

Since 1987 I am professor of Modern Swedish (svenska språket särskilt nusvenska) at Uppsala University. Over the years my research has mainly been devoted to socio-dialectology, theory of variational linguistics, historical stylistics, corpus linguistics, and language planning. I have published several monographs and a large number of scholarly articles in Swedish as well as international anthologies and periodicals. I have also been editor of a considerable number of volumes within my field of interest. For the last ten years I have been leading a research project on Swedish drama dialogue from early 18th century onwards in which quite a few research collegues at the department have been involved (click here for a list of relevant publications from this project). In cooperation with the English Department a joint corpus of English and Swedish drama texts from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries is now being composed for contrastive studies in historical pragmatics. This work started in 2010 and is financed by the Faculty of linguistics at Uppsala University.

I teach at the Department of Scandinavian languages, Uppsala university. For the time being I am supervisor of two PhD students. Up til now 30 students of mine have passed their PhD exams. I was head of the Department of Scandinavian languages 1990-95 and member of the quality group of the Faculty of linguistics 1994-96. Between 1998 and 2005 I was president/dean of the Bord of teacher education and teacher education research (from 2001 the Faculty of educational sciences) at Uppsala University.

From 1996 to 1998 I was Swedish representative of the ESF network on Convergence and divergence of dialects in a changing Europe, after that member of the scientific committee of ICLaVE (International conference on language variation in Europe). For five years I was a member of the international council for LANCHART Centre (Language change in real time) in Copenhagen, Denmark, and today I belong to a Copenhagen based network on Standard Language Ideology in Contemporary Europe (SLICE) and also to the steering committee of a large Helsinki based project, Swedish in Finland. For more than 20 years I have been chairman of the Adolf Noreen Society and at the same time chief editor of the journal Språk och stil (Language and Style, click on the name for a presentation in Swedish of this journal).

I was elected president of the Swedish language council (Svenska språknämnden) in 1999 and held that post till April 2007 when the institute was closed down after having been reorganized into a public authority in July 1st 2006. During 2000-02 I was engaged as scientific expert in the parliamentary committee for the Swedish language set up by the government in order to investigate future conditions for language planning and policy in Sweden.

I am working member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture, the Societas Litterarum Humaniorum Regia Upsaliensis, the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala, and honorary member of the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland.

Publications

Click here for a selected bibliography 1970-2010 on pdf.
A complete list of publications after 1995 is available through Uppsala University's publication data base DiVA: Publications 1995-.

Biographical data in short

• 1945 born in Skellefteå, Sweden.
• 1970 BA at Uppsala University (English, Scandinavian languages, Phonetics, Statistics).
• 1979 PhD in Scandinavian languages at Uppsala university.
• 1981 Associate Professor of Modern Swedish at Uppsala university.
• 1987 Professor of Modern Swedish (Svenska språket, särskilt nusvenska) at Uppsala University.