Kenneth Hyltenstam
Kenneth Hyltenstam (b. 1945) is Professor Emeritus of Bilingualism at Stockholm University, where he founded and long directed the Centre for Research on Bilingualism. He took his PhD in linguistics at Lund in 1978, moved to Stockholm in 1981 to build up the newly created bilingualism division, and from 1992 held the first Swedish chair dedicated to bilingualism research.
The research programme has two strands that reinforce each other. First, a long-running line on age of acquisition and ultimate attainment, which argues that even learners who pass for native speakers show subtle departures on sensitive tests, and that age of onset is the primary determinant of those departures. The 2009 Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam study on scrutinised near-native Swedish speakers is the standard reference. Second, the broader Swedish tradition of societal bilingualism research: migrant languages, minority-language rights, and language maintenance and loss across the lifespan.
Career
- PhD, Lund University, 1978
- Associate Professor, Stockholm University, from 1981
- Founding Director, Centre for Research on Bilingualism, 1988
- Professor of Bilingualism, 1992; Director until 2007 and again 2012–2013
- Professor Emeritus from 2015
Published Work
- Bilingualism across the Lifespan: Aspects of Acquisition, Maturity and Loss (ed. with Obler, 1989, Cambridge)
- Long series of papers with Niclas Abrahamsson on age of acquisition, near-native attainment, and maturational constraints
- Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility (ed. with Kerfoot, Routledge)
Influence
- Set the methodological bar in ultimate-attainment research by insisting that near-native is not native and showing how to test the difference
- Built Sweden's institutional home for bilingualism research and trained the researchers who now staff it
- A durable interlocutor for critical-period debates on both empirical and theoretical grounds