Chair no. 2 - Bo Ralph

Linguist.
Elected: 1999.

Bo Ralph’s main fields of research are Swedish lexicography and Nordic language history. His work includes a new interpretation of Sweden’s most famous runestone, the mythical Rök runestone.

Bo Ralph was born in Gothenburg in 1945. He received his Bachelor of Philosophy degree from the University of Gothenburg in 1969 and published his book Introduktion i historisk språkvetenskap (Introduction to Historical Linguistics) in 1972. As well as providing a historical exposition of the changing theories and methods of linguistics, the book played an active role in the formation of theories in generative linguistics. Three years later, he received his doctorate with the thesis Phonological Differentiation: Studies in Nordic Language History, which takes as its starting point various structural descriptions of fundamental changes within the Nordic languages.

Following his doctoral defence, Ralph remained affiliated with the University’s Department of Swedish Language and was appointed Reader in 1977. There, he worked on the groundbreaking Lexical Database project, which eventually resulted in the Svensk ordbok (SO; Swedish Dictionary) first published in 1986. The Department was also responsible for editing Svenska Akademiens ordlista (SAOL; Swedish Academy Word List). In 1982, Ralph received his professorship at Stockholm University’s Department of Nordic Languages, where he worked for two years. During this time, he served on the editorial committee for the publication of August Strindbergs Samlade verk (August Strindberg’s Collected Works, the so-called National Edition) and wrote the book Fornsvenska för nusvenskar (Old Swedish for New Swedes, 1983).

In 1984, Ralph returned to Gothenburg, this time as a professor at the Department of Nordic Languages. That same year, he became a member of the Board of the Swedish Centre for Technical Terminology and a member of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. The following year, he took up the position of chairman of the reference group for Swedish language teaching at the Swedish Institute and, in 1987, became a board member of the Bible Commission. Alongside his own research, he has worked on a number of other projects, including two popular science works on the Gothenburg dialect: Sicket mål (What a Dialect, 1986) and Mål på hemmaplan (Home Turf Dialect, 1987), which he wrote together with the linguist Lars-Gunnar Andersson.

In 2021 he published a major work in two volumes: Fadern, sonen och världsalltet. En nytolkning av runinskriften på Röksten (The Father, the Son and the Universe. A New Interpretation of the Rök Runestone Inscription). For a number of years, he has nevertheless been occupied with an even more extensive project, namely a future standard work on the history of the Swedish language. Commissioned by the Swedish Academy, this is intended to function as a counterpart to Svenska Akademiens grammatik (SAG; The Swedish Academy Grammar), which was first published in 1999. 

Bo Ralph was admitted to the Swedish Academy in 1999, when he succeeded the philosopher and sociologist Torgny Segerstedt on chair number 2.