Linguistic change among bilingual speakers of Finnish and American English in Sweden: Background and some tentative findings (original) (raw)
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Applied Psycholinguistics, 1999
This is a courageous book. Published as the author's doctoral thesis, this work strives retrospectively to “determine the significance of age in the acquisition of a second language” (p. 26). It has explicit interdisciplinary ambitions to integrate concepts and practices from various disciplines in which bilingual development is studied: notably, sociocultural theory, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, text linguistics, and pragmatics. These multifaceted theoretical aims are anchored in an equally broad empirical ground, drawing on various types of data. Not surprisingly, the result is a theoretically intriguing, yet methodologically puzzling, approach to the study of bilingualism and second language acquisition.
The aim of this project is focused on my approach to a bilingual study of the use of English by speakers of other languages through the analysis of text messages between them in a three-month span of time. In this case, the analysis will be focused in a speaker of Swedish and a speaker of Spanish as L1, and they both will use English as an L2. Therefore, the background of both speakers will be explained as well as that of the languages. These will be taken into consideration for the analysis of the data extracted from messages between both speakers as well as literature review on the question of the use of English by Swedes as an L2 and as a lingua franca to communicate with others in the Scandinavian country and the use of Swedish by non-native speakers. It is expected for both speakers to use their L2 in different situations and by different reasons throughout the text messages aforementioned. However, the main focus will be in the Swedish speaker using his L2.
Language survival: A study of language contact, language shift and language choice in Sweden
1985
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Language and Education
This article analyses the construction of linguistic value and recognition of linguistic resources in educational spaces in Finland, where Swedish is the second national language and in Sweden, where Finnish is one of five official minority languages. Drawing on ethnographic methods, critically informed notions of language policy and spatial theorization, we argue that linguistic hierarchies created through language and education policies manifest themselves in the discursive construction of linguistic value in the everyday educational spaces. In Finland, the strong societal and political status of Swedish and the monolingual school institutions enable the recognition of language as a right and a resource but potentially present linguistic diversity as a problem within those spaces. In Sweden, the historical traces of a problem orientation towards Finnish language remain, despite the aimed improvements in educational language rights and the shifting orientation on Finnish being recognized as a resource in the market-oriented educational system. Pupils in both countries mostly considered language as a communicative resource in their everyday social spaces but the negotiation of the societal value of language and bilingualism was rather controversial. Discussing linguistic disadvantage in relation to educational spaces will bring new perspectives to language and minority policies in linguistically diverse societies.
Swedish speech islands in Finland: A sociocultural linguistic perspective
The International Journal – Language, Society and Culture, 2011
In this paper, I discuss so-called Swedish speech islands (linguistic enclaves) in Finland past and present from the point of view of sociocultural linguistics. I do this mainly by focusing on the linguistic history and present-day of the city of Tampere, today the third largest city in Finland. By "Swedish speech islands in Finland" I mean the cities of Tampere (founded 1779) and Oulu (founded 1605) and the towns of Pori (founded 1558) and Kotka (founded 1879), all officially Finnish-speaking cities and towns with a small Swedish-speaking minority (0.2–1.0 % of the population in 2008). At the end of 2008, for example, Tampere, which is the largest of these and the only one located in inland Finland, had 209,552 inhabitants, of whom 1,065 (0.5 %) reported Swedish as their first language. In addition to the four cities and towns, there are, however, some other places in Finland at times referred to as "speech islands" , mainly places with an industrial history (e.g. the town of Varkaus in Eastern Finland). In this paper, I therefore touch on this type of "speech islands" as well, although I do not consider them speech islands in the same sense. – The paper is part of the projects “Linguistic change in an industrial town. Swedishness in Tampere, 1779–2000” (2008–2010) and “Bilingualism and multicultural Finland – best practices and future challenges” (2010–2014).