Folkmålsstudier

Retoriske konstruksjoner av ansvarlighet

Jeanette Hope — 2023-09-05

Rhetorical constructions of responsibility: Service users’ accounts in their digital dialogues with the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration

The goal of the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) for increased user participation and active service users entails a responsibility for NAV service users to participate actively in planning and carrying out activities. This implies that the service users are assigned a responsibility to share information about their personal limitations and needs. They do this through accounts in the interaction with their NAV counsellor. To an ever-increasing extent, the interaction between service users and counsellors in NAV takes place in a digital communication channel. Using rhetorical discourse analysis of written digital user dialogues in NAV, I explore how service users and counsellors negotiate responsibility for planning and decisions related to the service user’s activities. Through rhetorical accounts such as character work, legitimization, and excuses, service users position themselves as more or less responsible users. The analysis shows that the service users express both a moral and a legal responsibility, and they balance this responsibility by extending the category of ”service user” in their accounts. The way that service users balance their responsibility can be understood as an expression of uncertainty related to their duties and their rights in relation to NAV. The article shows that a pathway to understanding service user participation may be to investigate in greater depth how moral and legal responsibility is expressed in digital interaction.

Språkuppfattningar och röster i österbottniska flerspråkiga elevers stiliserade tal

Paulina Nyman-Koskinen — 2023-09-05

Language beliefs and voices in stylized speech of Ostrobothnian multilingual pupils

This qualitative study investigates stylized speech performed by multilingual pupils who use a Finland-Swedish dialect, Finnish, and standard Swedish as linguistic resources. Moreover, the aim is, by using methods from interactional sociolinguistics, to identify linguistic and paralinguistic features of their stylized speech and what kind of explicit and implicit language beliefs and voices they convey. The analysis shows that the pupils stylize the standard Swedish language as well as the Finnish language in different ways, but not their Finland-Swedish dialect. The stylizations reflect both explicitly and implicitly the pupils’ beliefs about the language policy in the classroom, as well as their attitudes towards their language resources and their experiences with them. Moreover, the stylizations reflect beliefs about a shared language register. The voices identified in connection with the stylizations are polyphonic: partly, the pupils’ voice is heard, and partly the pupils impact each other’s voices. A voice of authority is identified as is the voice of someone not belonging to the same language group. The stylizations, language beliefs, and voices are linked to the pupils’ personal experiences, the norms and expectations that apply in the interaction, and the explicit and implicit discourses about their language resources.

Digitalt medierade kommunikationspraktiker hos finlandssvenskar i schweizisk diaspora

Jessica Rosenberg — 2023-09-05

Digitally mediated communication practices of Swedish-speaking Finns in Swiss diaspora

Digital communication channels make it possible to communicate and maintain social relationships without necessarily sharing the same time and space. In addition, for many who have moved to another country, digital communication channels offer opportunities to maintain not only their native language and culture but also connections to their former home country. There is little qualitative research on Swedish-speaking Finns living abroad, although they represent a relatively large proportion of the total number of Swedish-speaking Finns. This case study investigates the digital communication practices of two Swedish-speaking Finns in a diaspora, with a focus on contact with the former homeland and the use of the Swedish language.

The material consists of six semi-structured interviews with two Swedish-speaking Finns in Switzerland and their media diaries, visualised using mediagrams (Lexander & Androutsopoulos 2021). The study highlights the choices and justifications for the different communication channels and modalities used, drawing on and going beyond the theory of polymedia (Madianou & Miller 2012; 2013). The study discusses eight factors – emotional, social, practical, habitual, cultural, linguistic, pedagogical, and historical – that describe how these two individuals in a diaspora navigate the polymedia environment. The findings suggest that digital communication plays an important role for these individuals in facilitating both personal and professional contacts with Finland and provides crucial tools for maintaining and enabling the use of the Swedish language.

Samisk påvirkning på skandinavisk grammatikk?

Hans-Olav Enger — 2023-09-05

Saami influence on Scandinavian grammar?

Older histories of the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) commonly assume that German has influenced the Scandinavian languages heavily. By contrast, they do not assume any significant influence from the Saami languages. This traditional view has, however, been challenged in an interesting monograph by Kusmenko (2008). While Kusmenko’s hypotheses have been met with scepticism by some specialists of Scandinavian, they have also been received favourably by some, notably Bull (for example in this journal, 2017). Yet Bull also points to an important weakness in Kusmenko’s argument – the near-absence of lexical influence despite the supposedly heavy grammatical influence. However, Bull argues that this absence is apparent rather than real; in Norwegian dialects in the very North, Saami loan-words are more numerous. In this paper, I argue that evidence from these dialects is not necessarily very relevant, since Kusmenko’s hypotheses primarily concern dialects further south. While Kusmenko and Bull are justified in criticising the ideological bias in much language historiography in Norway, and while it now seems clear that prestige relations between speakers of Saami and Scandinavian need not have been the same a millennium ago as they were a century ago, the more strictly linguistic evidence adduced by Kusmenko is still not convincing. The absence of good parallels make his scenario look less plausible.

”Tänk före du skriver”. Uppgiftsmiljö som utmaning och möjlighet för examinander med språkbadsbakgrund i studentexamensprovet i A-svenska.

Camilla Rosvall — 2023-09-05

List Construction in Finland-Swedish Sign Language

Satu Siltaloppi — 2023-09-05

Språköverskridande policy och verksamhet på ett samlokaliserat daghem

Pauliina Sopanen — 2023-09-05

Heikki Oja: Helgonnamn i almanackan

Väinö Syrjälä — 2023-09-05

Förord

Martina Huhtamäki — 2023-09-05