Ett experiment kring klassindexerande språkdrag i finlandssvenskan
Abstract
An experimental study of linguistic features indexing social class in Finland Swedish
This article explores how listeners assess the social status of speakers in a listening task and which linguistic features they use as clues in their assessments. Thereby, the study aims at revealing salient linguistic features and indexical relations between linguistic features and social class in Swedish spoken in Finland (Finland Swedish). The data consists of an online listening task completed by 213 participants. The results show that the assessments are rather unanimous, which indicates that there is a common understanding of how people from different social classes sound. The study exposes several linguistic features that have cognitive and social salience for the listeners and thus can index social class, e.g. vocabulary, pronunciation and different dialect features. Furthermore, the results indicate that the imagined social identities are interrelated to the imagined regional identities.
