University of Gothenburg
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Morgan Nilsson

Senior Lecturer

Department of Languages and Literatures
Telephone
+46 31-786 18 24
Mail
morgan.nilsson@sprak.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41256 Göteborg
Room number
D406
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Morgan Nilsson

I am employed as a Senior Lecturer in Somali at the University of Gothenburg, where I have taught the subject since 2014, but I hold a PhD in Slavic languages. 

I am particularly interested in linguistics, and my interest in languages is of a very general nature. In addition to Somali and the Slavic languages, I am especially interested in Persian, but over the years I have also studied some Italian, French, Spanish, Finnish, Latin, Greek, Dari, Tajik, Maay, Oromo, Arabic, Hungarian, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic. In short, I have a broad general interest in language as a system and in the grammatical description of different languages, especially phonological and morphological structures, lexicology and lexicography, differences between standardised/codified language and everyday spoken language, as well as the comparative and typological study of languages.

This doesn't mean that I can speak all the languages that I have studied, but I can read texts in most of them and I have knowledge of how the languages are structured. The languages I speak best are Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, and English. At times I have also worked as a translator from these four Slavic languages. Most recently, I translated the novel Nekropolis by the Slovene author Boris Pahor.

Teaching

I have taught at the University of Gothenburg since 1989. At present, I teach exclusively in our Somali courses, both for native speakers and for beginners. Previously, I have also taught courses in Slovene, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Russian, and Ukrainian, as well as the module General Grammar in the department’s various introductory courses, and the module Languages of the World in the first term of the International Language Programme. In my teaching, I have produced a number of teaching materials in both Somali and different Slavic languages. I have also devoted considerable effort to e‑learning and have taught many fully online courses.

Research

My doctoral dissertation is titled Vowel-Zero Alternations in West Slavic Prepositions: A Corpus Based Investigation of Polish, Slovak and Czech. It deals primarily with the phonological principles that govern the choice between the short and long forms of prepositions in these three major West Slavic languages.

At present, however, I devote myself exclusively to Somali, and there are certain particularly interesting phenomena to which I pay special attention. In particular, this concerns Somali prosody, but also the noun categories of gender, number and case, as well as verbal tense, aspect and mood. I am also working on updating my bibliography of literature related to the scientific study of the Somali language, as well as an electronic Somali–Swedish–English dictionary and a Somali grammar written in English.

In all my work with different languages, I make extensive use of electronic text corpora to investigate various linguistic phenomena. Since October 2015, we have also, fortunately, had access to a Somali corpus at the Swedish Language Bank.