Alueellisen taustan vaikutus murrekäsityksiin

• Marjatta Palander

Abstrakti

Regional variation in perceptions of Finnish dialects (englanti)

1/2007 (111)

Regional variation in perceptions of Finnish dialects

The article examines Finns perceptions of the different dialects of Finnish. Specifically, it examines the perceptions of young people in the Helsinki region and in North and South Karelia, looking particularly at how they view their own dialect and the dialects spoken elsewhere. The study data consists of questionnaire interviews conducted in the period 1998-2004, in which the informants were asked, among other things, to draw the boundaries of the different dialect areas on a map of Finland and to characterise the dialects identified. The number of informants in North and South Karelia amounted to 126 (108 of whom took part in the mapping question), and those in the Helsinki region totalled 116.

Informants in both the Helsinki region and in North and South Karelia were able to identify a range of dialects based on geographical regions and certain towns and cities. The most frequently cited dialects were those of Savo, Lapland, Turku and Ostrobothnia. Geographically, the regions of central Finland, Kainuu and (especially in the case of informants in the Helsinki region) southern Finland were often omitted from consideration by the informants. This was because the dialects of these regions were either considered to be standard Finnish or to lack characteristic dialectal features. On average, informants in North and South Karelia identified more dialect areas than those in the Helsinki region.

Informants in the Helsinki region identified the geographical boundaries and dialectal features of their region in greater detail than did the informants from North and South Karelia, and vice versa. The informants in North and South Karelia generally distinguished the North Karelian from the South Karelian dialect, and they had a clear perception that the Savo dialect was based in the North Savo region. The Helsinki region informants had a less clear perception of the dialects of eastern Finland: the Savo and Karelian dialects were mentioned but geographically they were shown as overlapping in the North Karelia region, and largely the same dialect features (most importantly the pronouns mie me and sie you) were cited as characteristic of both regions. Likewise, the informants from North and South Karelia commonly referred to the colloquial Finnish spoken in the Helsinki region as the Helsinki dialect, whereas residents of the Helsinki region distinguished the Helsinki (or Stadi) dialect from that of the wider Helsinki region. The Finnish spoken in the Helsinki region was easier for the Karelian informants to imitate than the eastern Finnish dialects were for the Helsinki region informants.

Informants from both the Helsinki region and North and South Karelia felt that their own dialect was sometimes undervalued. The writer notes that such projected autostereotypes indicate that informants may have a rather negative view of their own dialect.

Marjatta Palander