This article makes a case for studying the perceptions that young people have of the ways of speaking of both themselves and others on the supposition that constructions of ambient sociolinguistic variation have an impact on the language development and use of individual language users. Such a study is particularly relevant in multilingual contexts in which differences with regard to social as well as ethnic and linguistic background may generate significantly different perceptions. In a speaker evaluation study, Swedish speech stimuli from 12 young Stockholmers were evaluated by 343 listeners from different backgrounds. The results show that young people may divide and relate to the linguistic space of Stockholm in very different ways and that they vary in their degree of accuracy regarding linguistic self-perception.

No abstract

No abstract

In Sweden, over the few past decades, a large amount of research has been conducted on new urban youth styles, here called suburban slang. More recently, some researchers have begun to focus on the way young individuals from multilingual suburbs speak in more formal situations, here called suburban Swedish – i.e. Swedish close to standard but with a suburban touch, due to, in particular, phonological features indexing suburb. Among the general public, these two ways of speaking are often lumped together under popular labels such as immigrant Swedish or Rinkeby Swedish. As a result, widespread negative attitudes towards the well-known suburban slang risk “rubbing off” on suburban Swedish. This may cause serious problems for the speakers, e.g. if this occurs in a job interview. This danger of negative evaluation was investigated in a folk-linguistic listener study on gatekeeper perceptions. Ten speech stimuli from young adult speakers (among which two samples each of suburban Swedish and suburban slang) were evaluated by 95 gatekeepers (employment officers, student counselors and teachers). A range of data types was analyzed: attitude scales, variety labeling, assessments of the speakers’ occupational level and linguistic background, as well as group discussion data. Results show, among other things, that suburban-sounding speech (slang as well as suburban Swedish) correlates highly with gatekeepers’ low ratings of the speakers’ occupational level. Moreover, the participating gatekeepers lack adequate terminology to differentiate between these two ways of speaking. This implies that sociolinguistic awareness raising should receive more critical attention within the educational sector, including the training for various professions in the public and private sector.

The present study aims to characterize the perception of stylistic nuances of lexical items in both Swedish and Finnish among members of the Sweden Finnish minority in Sweden, with special emphasis on Swedish. Data on stylistic perceptions were elicited from 77 bilingual Sweden Finns and from a Swedish and a Finnish control group. The subjects were asked to describe the connotative and stylistic meanings of 14 pairs of synonymous words in Swedish (e.g., polis—snut `police—cop') and in Finnish, using Osgood's semantic differential. The main issue was to discuss to what extent the Sweden Finns show similarity to the Swedes and/or Finns regarding their stylistic perceptions. The results of the analysis indicate that the various Sweden Finnish test groups(divided according to sex and generation) have a different level of competence in Swedish regarding the perception of stylistic nuances. Adult men differentiated significantly less for all word pairs, while adolescents and women perceived these words largely in the same way as the Swedes in the corresponding subgroups. The results are discussed in the context of the ongoing debate on immigrants and integration, and suggest that a more similar language use may indicate a higher degree of integration.