Farewell to Emeritus Professor Jan Svartvik, Lund University, Sweden

We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of Emeritus Professor Jan Svartvik, a renowned linguist from Lund University, Sweden. Born on 18 August 1931 in Värmland, Sweden, Jan passed away in Lund on 18 June 2024.

Jan was a pioneer in the field of corpus linguistics, having developed the world’s first spoken corpus, the London-Lund Corpus of spoken British English, in the mid-1970s. He was also the co-founder of ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Medieval and Modern English, in 1977, which has grown into an important international organization for the computational analysis of the English language.

Jan was the author of numerous books and articles, including the influential Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985) and A Communicative Grammar of English (third edition, 2002).

He will be greatly missed by his colleagues and students. To learn more about Jan’s contributions to the field of linguistics, you can visit his autobiography at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/about/svartvik.htm or read about the history of ICAME at https://icame.info/history-the-beginnings/.