L'influsso bassotedesco sulla fraseologia dello svedese tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna

The research on the language contact between Middle Low German and the Scandinavian languages has, up to now, focused mainly on its definition as "language" or "dialect contact" or on its influence on the lexicon of the Scandinavian languages (loanwords and loan-translations of Low German words), while almost nobody has investigated the possibility that, during this intense and prolonged contact, not only single lexemes, but also entire phrases, phrasemes, were borrowed by the Nordic languages. The aim of this study was, therefore, to analyse the phraseology of the first texts written in Swedish in order to estimate the importance of the Middle Low German influence in this field and, thus, to fill, at least in part, this gap in the research on the language contact between Northern Germany and Scandinavia and on its effects on the Scandinavian languages. In this respect, this study is the first step of an ongoing contrastive research on the phraseology of Low German and of the Scandinavian languages (not only Swedish, but also Danish and Norwegian) and is aimed at representing the touchstone for further studies.