Town and country: when dialect meets standard in urban environments: the case of Finland Swedish
2005; De Gruyter; Volume: 43; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1515/ling.2005.43.5.1049
ISSN1613-396X
Autores Tópico(s)Multilingual Education and Policy
ResumoFinland Swedish is the name of the specific variety of Swedish in Finland that is spoken in Finland today by about 300,000 people, mainly settled on the western and southern coasts and in the archipelago in the southwest. In the 1990s a sociolinguistic project, ‘‘Urban Colloquial Swedish in Finland,’’ was carried out in four towns in this area: Jakobstad and Kristinestad in the northern area of Ostrobothnia, and Ekenäs and Lovisa in Nyland in the southern area. The project focused on the social variation of language according to age and level of education of the 94 informants and on the degree of structural dependence of the town on the neighboring dialects. In this article, therefore, migration is examined mainly from an historical point of view. Each of the four towns has, in one sense or another, its own sociolinguistic structure. Sociolinguistically distinguished varieties (sociolects) were identified in Jakobstad, Ekenäs, and Lovisa, but not in Kristinestad. By looking a bit more closely at the two Ostrobothnian towns of Jakobstad and Kristinestad, I attempt to determine under which conditions sociolects are to be identified, and, under which conditions specific urban dialects (town dialects) emerge or fail to emerge as a result of contact between traditional dialects and the standard language. It is shown that Kristinestad and Jakobstad have rather different sociolinguistic profiles, owing in no small part to their different eras of settlement, degree of industrial development, and relation to hinterland dialects.
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