Chapter 14. ‘Rinkeby Swedish’ in the Mind of the Beholder. Studying Listener Perceptions of Language Variation in Multilingual Stockholm

Bijvoet, Ellen; Fraurud, Kari

doi:10.21832/9781847693143-017

Cited by 17 publications

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“…that the adolescents probably identified prosodic and segmental features (from a Swedish point of view) of a more general "foreign-sounding" Swedish and incorporated these into their way of speaking. Bijvoet and Fraurud's (2010) folklinguistic perceptual experiments (cf. Preston, 1999) found that what was considered Rinkebysvenska (or "foreign-sounding") and identifications as to what part of Stockholm a speaker came from depended on the listener.…”

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“…However, none were able to show the systematic and frequent use of new features that would be expected based on Kotsinas's original claims. Bijvoet and Fraurud (2013) argued that Rinkebysvenska (and similar ways of speaking in Gothenburg and Malmö) is best seen as a social construct associated with a heterogeneous group of speakers with the common denominator that the adolescents are making use of immigrant-and youth-related features associated with lexical borrowing, learner language, and slang. Under this view, they regard this way of speaking as a style without reifying it as a "lect," whether it be a dialect or a (multi)ethnolect.…”

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A tale of two cities (and one vowel): Sociolinguistic variation in Swedish

et al. 2016

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Previous studies of language contact in multilingual urban neighborhoods in Europe claim the emergence of new varieties spoken by immigrant-background youth. This paper examines the sociolinguistic conditioning of variation in allophones of Swedish /ε:/ of young people of immigrant and nonimmigrant background in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Although speaker background and sex condition the variation, their effects differ in each city. In Stockholm there are no significant social differences and the allophonic difference appears to have been neutralized. Gothenburg speakers are divided into three groups, based on speaker origin and sex, each of which orients toward different norms. Our conclusions appeal to dialectal diffusion and the desire to mark ethnic identity in a diverse sociolinguistic context. These results demonstrate that not only language contact but also dialect change should be considered together when investigating language variation in modern-day cities.

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A tale of two cities (and one vowel): Sociolinguistic variation in Swedish

et al. 2016

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“…In this paper, multiethnolect [18] refers to the variety often spoken in Stockholm's multiethnic neighborhoods. Sundry terms circulate, but Rinkeby Swedish [19,20,21,22] remains the most well known, although it no longer is solely bound to the immigrant suburb, Rinkeby. It has other 21ST-century geographic indexicalities, including the outer northwestern and southwestern suburbs [21,23] (Figure 1).…”

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confidence: 99%

Rhythm in Stockholm's two working-class varieties: Separate models predict intervocalic durational contrast

Young¹

2018

Speech Prosody 2018

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This study shows that two distinct social models predict speech rhythm variation -measured by the normalized pairwise variability index of vowels (nPVI-V) -for Stockholm's two working classes. The non-white working-class variety (multiethnolect) has less intervocalic durational contrast than the speech of elites (41-51 vs. 49-57) and correlates with the speaker's neighborhood diversity. Incremental increases in neighborhood diversity correlate with incremental decreases in nPVI-V. The white working-class variety has more intervocalic durational contrast than the speech of elites (53-61 vs. 49-57) and correlates to occupational status. Incremental decreases in occupational status correlate with incremental increases in nPVI-V.The data comes from 31 male Stockholmers, ages 24-49, who read aloud a passage with 285 vocalic elements. Thirteen self-identify as white 'Swedes': five working class, eight uppermiddle class ('elites'). Eighteen self-identify as non-white 'immigrants': five working class, seven lower-middle class, six upper-middle class ('elites'). Twenty-eight were born in Sweden; three arrived before age four. They hail from five neighborhood types that are representative of Stockholm's geographic ethnic distributions.The findings add Swedish multiethnolect to a growing list of contact varieties with less intervocalic durational contrast than their heritage counterparts. The findings also nudge our field's discussion of rhythm away from second-language acquisition to the social domain of race and class. At the same time, a new research question emerges whether intervocalic durational contrast is a sociolinguistic variable in its own right or a byproduct of segment-level variation.

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“…They were encouraged to use their own words and ways of speaking. To avoid verbatim repetition, no written manuscript was provided; instead, the speakers listened to a couple of sample phone calls recorded earlier (for a detailed description of the elicitation method, see Bijvoet & Fraurud, 2010 ). In all, 161 speech samples were obtained from the 48 speakers.…”

Section: A Study Of Young People's Perceptions Of Ambient Sociolinguimentioning

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Studying High-Level (L1-L2) Development and Use Among Young People in Multilingual Stockholm

Bijvoet

Fraurud

2012

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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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.

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Chapter 14. ‘Rinkeby Swedish’ in the Mind of the Beholder. Studying Listener Perceptions of Language Variation in Multilingual Stockholm

Cited by 17 publications

References 0 publications

A tale of two cities (and one vowel): Sociolinguistic variation in Swedish

A tale of two cities (and one vowel): Sociolinguistic variation in Swedish

Rhythm in Stockholm's two working-class varieties: Separate models predict intervocalic durational contrast

Studying High-Level (L1-L2) Development and Use Among Young People in Multilingual Stockholm

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