A hundred years before language learners were organising communities online, there was newspaper correspondence. 

Writing to the newspaper as an everyday reader used to be the surest route to having your voice heard. Victorian titles devoted columns and columns to “letters to the editor” – a place for readers to share their opinions on the matters than concerned them. Politics, both local and national, led the way there, as you might expect. Thoughts on local dialect, too, get a good look-in.

But language learners made their presence felt, too.

There’s a lovely sequence of letters I came across an 1897 edition of the Oban Times and Argyllshire Advertiser, which shows the kind of language expertise being shared back then. These letters, titled How to Learn Gaelic, almost come across as mini lessons. They’re full of interesting tidbits of information for learners – no doubt invaluable if the nearest bookshop was many miles away. Here’s one example from repeat reader’s letter writer Alexander MacDougall:

Newspaper correspondence on the Gaelic language, 1897.

Readers used the letters page to promote the Gaelic cause, too. This 1912 submission to the Banffshire Advertiser from Arbroath reader Seumas MacGaradh is full of optimism and encouragement:

Letter to a newspaper on the benefits of learning Gaelic, 1912.

They’re the kind of things you see readily on social platforms today – grammar advice, encouragement, celebration of language. It’s language community at a slower pace, for sure; there are no instant answers, just patient readers. But their needs and wants as learners aren’t much different from our own.

And perhaps that idea of learning as a slow burn is still quite tantalising. In this instant-answers world, might the absolute ease of sharing information take some of that early magic away? As much as I love and appreciate learning on-demand, I can’t help but imagine the thrill of finally seeing your words make it to print – and sparking a volley of replies.

There are some useful crossovers between language learning and ‘full on’ linguistics, as I think of it, where the one helps your knowledge of the other. I’ve been looking at language change recently, digging into a few papers on a Norwegian and Swedish trend that can add a really authentic-sounding twist to your speech.

The phenomenon is called ha-dropping. No, not h-dropping, which might ‘elp your English sound more colloquial, but ha, or have, in both Norwegian and Swedish – specifically, the have of the perfect tense.

If you’ve spent some time reading and listening to these languages, it’s something that can throw you off the first time you hear it. In short, ha can simply go missing where you’d expect to hear it in English:

De burde solgt det (they should have sold it – Norwegian)

The variant with ha still exists, of course – de burde ha solgt det – and it’s still considered correct. These days, however, it tends to sound a little bookish or formal.

Sounding too correct

It looks like a classic case of redundancy leading to loss. The context is obvious from the use of the past participle, so why bother with ha? It reduces a three-verb construction to just two verbs, and the meaning is still completely recoverable.

But what surprised me most was that it’s not a recent trend (as if young speakers needed any further blame shame for language-changing innovations). One paper traces ha-dropping in Swedish right back to the 17th Century, although the circumstances it occurs in may be extending. In Norwegian, it’s restricted on the whole to ha after modal verbs, and seems pretty stable where it is.

Apart from the fact that it’s a fascinating change in itself, it also highlights one of those cases where you can sound too correct as a non-native speaker. Ha-dropping is intuitively odd for first-language speakers of English, but working it into your Scandi convo might make you sound that little bit more fluent.