Folkmålsstudier

Flerspråkighet i språkbruk och språkinlärning i Finland i ett historiskt perspektiv

2023-09-26T10:37:03+03:00

Multilingualism in language use and language learning in Finland from a historical perspective

In this paper multilingualism and multilingual language use in Finland is discussed from the Middle Ages to the 19^th century. A central theme is what happens in multilingual meetings between people. Multilingualism is also treated from the point of how conversations contribute to language learning and increased competence in a language. The data consist of examples from administrative and private texts such as letters and diaries. The languages explored are mainly Swedish and Finnish, and Low German and Russian to some extent.

In Finland, Swedish and Finnish have been spoken during historical times in different areas and by different classes. There have also been bilingual communities since medieval times, but the interaction at least in the 18^th century has mostly been of receptive art (Kuvaja et al 2007). In the studied texts, multilingualism is manifested as receptive multilingualism in medieval letters in Low German and Swedish (cf. Braunmüller 2007). Productive multilingualism is attested as code-switching from medieval texts to 19^th century. The reasons for code-switching can be found in the genre and function of the texts, such as naming medieval boundary lines in Swedish and Finnish according to what was practical. In private texts, code-switching has been used for example in reported speech to distance oneself from the recipient or to show the turning-point in a narrative (cf. Franceschini 1998 and Gumperz 1982). The examples also show a move from communities of practice where two languages are spoken and acquired towards bilingual communities in the 19^th century (cf Saari 1993 and Wenger 1998).

Mellan olika språk och kulturer: Språklig identitetskonstruktion bland transkulturella ungdomar i Svenskfinland

2024-08-12T12:08:57+03:00

Subjekt, indefinithet och adverbial. Textstruktur och syntax i äldre fornsvenska

2024-08-12T12:15:10+03:00

Svenskan vid Helsingfors universitet: språkpolicy, attityder, realiteter

2024-08-12T12:29:59+03:00

Attityder till engelskan och till svenskan ur ett finskspråkigt perspektiv

2024-08-12T12:31:09+03:00

Förord

2024-09-26T10:38:13+03:00

”God svenska med ett kling av västnyländska”

2023-11-13T13:10:22+02:00

”Good Swedish with a touch of western Nyland dialect”. On the relationship between dialect and standard Swedish among in-migrants from Ekenäs

This paper explores the reported language change of Swedish-speaking in-migrants (i.e. persons who move within the same country) in Finland, focusing on people who have moved from a small municipality in western Nyland to other parts of Finland. From a folk linguistic perspective, based on data from a web survey, the study examines the in-migrants' perceptions of changes in their language use on the continuum between the local western Nyland dialect and Finland-Swedish standard language. Overall, the data provide a complex picture. The migrants report differing linguistic starting points and varying long-term language accommodation profiles. Correlations between accommodation profiles and non-linguistic background factors are also investigated using statistical methods. These results show that age at migration, dialect attitudes and senses of regional belonging seem to correlate with reported language change.

Läsarperspektiv på läsning av lättlästa myndighetstexter

2023-11-21T17:07:14+02:00

Reading Easy Language public authority texts. Reader perspectives.

More and more public authority information is only available online as services become increasingly digitized. This development also concerns Easy Language texts. This qualitative study investigated the reading of Easy Language texts written by public authorities among readers in a day centre for people with intellectual disabilities, with focus on what the readers recalled and how they reacted. The analysis method consisted of qualitative content analysis with a conventional approach (Hsieh & Shannon 2005) and included deriving codes according to key content in the material and sorting key content into categories. The results showed that the participants mainly recalled details or single words of most of the texts, and that the participants’ perceptions of their own comprehension were linked to reactions such as performance anxiety, information related to the participants’ private life and text evaluation. The results also showed a link between prior knowledge and apparent comprehension and between word-level characteristics in the texts – such as amount of abstract nouns, infrequent words and extra long words – and apparent comprehension.

Genreutveckling i vetenskaplig prosa

2023-11-13T13:08:57+02:00

The purpose of this article – Genre development in scientific prose. Clas Bjerkander’s entomological findings in the Transactions of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 1775–1795 – is to analyze the early (natural) scientific genre development in Sweden during the 18th century, focusing on the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and its Transactions, as a discursive community. The Transactions are considered an early example of what we now refer to as sakprosa but have never been thoroughly analyzed regarding its genre specific characteristics. Bjerkander’s 26 findings on entomology are chosen as material for this study, grounded in genre analysis (Swales 1990, 2004; Bhatia 2004). The
results reveal that Bjerkander’s entomological findings evolve into three subgenres. From a genre development perspective, Bjerkander’s texts primarily reflect an establishing stage (Gunnarsson 2011), but they anticipate a specialized stage in three instances: Bjerkander’s use of the so-called CARS model, his methodological awareness, and his use of references to previous research.

Ett experiment kring klassindexerande språkdrag i finlandssvenskan

2023-11-16T11:01:32+02:00

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.