Ickeregulära

Ickeregulära is a term that appears primarily in Swedish-language texts as a nonstandard variant of icke-regulära, meaning irregular or not conforming to a regular pattern. It is not a formal technical term in most disciplines, and standard usage tends to prefer icke-regulära or oregelbundna.

In linguistics and morphology, irregular forms are those that do not follow regular rules for a given paradigm. Irregular verbs, for example, do not produce their past tense or participles by adding the usual suffixes. In English, go went, be was/were, and have had exemplify irregular conjugation. In Swedish, verbs such as vara (present är, past var, participle varit) and ha (har, hade, haft) show irregular behavior within their conjugation patterns. Irregularities can arise from historical sound changes, suppletion, or lexical borrowing.

In formal language theory, the concept of irregularity is often expressed in terms of regular versus non-regular languages. Regular languages can be described by finite automata or regular expressions. Non-regular languages require more powerful formalisms, such as context-free grammars. Examples of non-regular languages include {a^n b^n | n ≥ 0} and palindromes over an alphabet. These languages are not recognized by finite automata but can be described by pushdown automata or context-free grammars.

Usage note: when writing in Swedish, it is more common to use icke-regulära or oregelbundna for the standard term, reserving any nonstandard spellings like ickeregulära for informal or typographical contexts. The concept of irregularity, however, remains central across linguistics and computer science, conveying deviation from predictable or regular patterns.