Suomalais-suomenruotsalainen koti lapsen kaksikielisenä kasvuympäristönä

• Heidi Rontu

Avainsanat: kaksikielisyys, kielellinen identiteetti, kielen kehitys, lapsenkieli, suomenruotsi

Abstrakti

Bilingual upbringing in a Finno-Swedish context (englanti)

2/2004 (108)

Bilingual upbringing in a Finno-Swedish context

The article examines the linguistic environment of bilingual children growing up in families in which one parents mother tongue is Finnish and the others Finno-Swedish. The writer focuses on the role of each parent in the formation of language strategies used in the family and particularly with the child.

The parents own linguistic and cultural identity and their attitude towards the other language and its speakers and towards bilingualism are important factors. These factors manifest themselves in each parents daily language use within the family and in the language choices made with the child. The study material consists of parent-child conversations and parental interviews in eight families, each with one Finno-Swedish and one Finnish-speaking parent, in the city of Turku. When speaking with their children, the parents in the study tried to adhere to their own mother tongue. It was found that the families either used Finnish and Finno-Swedish in about equal measure or used Finno-Swedish slightly more than Finnish. Both languages were valued and the attitude towards each language community was positive, even to the extent that the enthusiasm of some Finnish-speaking parents led to an imbalance within the family in favour of Finno-Swedish. In the childs language development this was seen as a greater readiness to use, and more active use of, Finno-Swedish, not only with the Finno-Swedish-speaking but also the Finnish-speaking parent.

To illustrate the dominance of Finno-Swedish, the writer looks more closely at the conversations between a daughter and her Finnish-speaking mother, particularly the code-switching situations. The only family member with whom the daughter spoke Finnish was her mother, and it was also possible to speak Finno-Swedish with her mother. The language strategies followed by the mother when her daughter switched to Finno-Swedish did not demand any further Finnish from the daughter and did not steer the conversational context in a more monolinguistic (i.e. Finnish) direction. On the basis of the strategies used by the mother in these code-switching situations, it can be said that the dominance of Finno-Swedish in this particular childs home is both a quantitative dominance and partially also a dominance in terms of language strategy.

Heidi Rontu