Search

To discover the essential differences in cultural and linguistic patterns of a certain society, we need to look no further than to the most common relations of all – those between family members. When studying, working and living in, or for instance marrying into another culture, we must not only learn, but also acquire and utilise a whole new set of relationships and terms in order to be able to function and communicate. Without this knowledge we will quickly encounter a multitude of social difficulties in the other environment. On a deeper level, if we follow the assumption that a language is the mirror of its culture, and that language also influences culture, the linguistic terms designating family relations present a number of interesting phenomena, such as: which relations occupy the centre of importance in the society; the concept and understanding of a core family; which family relations are considered “worth” having a term for, and thus meaningful to keep up; the relations after a crisis, for instance a divorce; and several more, including the transfer of family relations to friendship and business contacts. This qualitative pilot study discusses some important aspects of family relations from the perspectives of Swedish-language (Sweden and Swedish-speakers in Finland) family terminology, in comparison with Serbian and Bulgarian. The study also includes a Serbian-language survey about kinship terms, and it raises questions about further research into cultural and social patterns and connotations reflected in kinship terminology. Social and cultural differences specifically between the Serbian and Swedish spheres are highlighted; the Bulgarian and Swedish-speaking terminologies in Finland are used here mainly as references and for comparative purposes. The study combines different scientific fields in mapping out some aspects of cognitive, social and cultural patterns. It emphasises the importance and necessity of multilingual and multicultural learning instead of foreign language and culture learning, and shows some of the pitfalls and possibilities students of languages and cultures encounter when learning new kinship concepts and terms.

This study examines positive low- and high-grade assessments in service encounters between customers and salespersons conducted in Swedish and recorded in Sweden and Finland. The assessments occur in a regular sequential pattern as third-turn moves that complete request-delivery sequences, longer coherent requesting sections, or request sequences in a pre-closing context. The positive valence of the assessments coheres with the satisfactory outcome of task completion, but their function is primarily pragmatic, used for segmenting the flow of task-oriented institutional interaction. The assessments stand as lexical TCUs, and their delivery is characterized by downgraded prosody and the speaker's embodied shift away from the other. The analysis reveals distributional differences in the interactional practice: Customers produce task-completing assessments more often than the salespersons, and high-grade assessments are more frequent in the data from Sweden than from Finland. The data are in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish with English translations. Interaktion och variation i pluricentriska språk (IVIP).

This study investigates cross-linguistic transfer in the production of long mid front vowels [oː] and [œː] by simultaneous bilingual Finnish and Finland-Swedish speakers in Finland. In Swedish, the phoneme /o/ can be realised as the allophones [o] and [œ], while in Finnish, only [o] is used. Combining approaches from sociophonetic and bilingual transfer research, the study used acoustic analysis to compare the height and fronting of [oː] and [œː] produced by bilingual and monolingual Finland-Swedish speakers in three different speech styles on a continuum of formality. The data from 115 participants are stratified according to language background, speech style, region, and age. The statistical analysis indicates increased overlap of [oː] and [œː] in the vowel spaces of bilingual speakers, particularly in informal speech. The results suggest a potential effect of Finnish transfer on the distinction of the phonetic variants in simultaneous Finland-Swedish bilinguals, as well as demonstrate the importance of considering speech style in bilingual transfer research.

Reklam sägs använda ett modernt, gärna ett nyskapande språk. Detta är ett påstående som inte så lätt kan verifieras. Tidningsannonsen är troligen den skriftspråksgenre som har fått minst uppmärksamhet av språkforskare. De som skriver texten i en tidningsannons är personer som representerar det samtida språkbruket. Annonser som representerar olika tidsepoker skiljer sig därför från varandra inte bara genom att annonsen förändras i fråga om stil och form. Annonsens språk avspeglar också den språkliga förändringsprocess som kontinuerligt pågår i varje språksamhälle. Annonser, och marknadsföringsmaterial över huvud taget, läses också av många människor som i övrigt läser mycket litet eller kanske inte alls. Marknadsföraren, reklamskribenten (copywriter) och AD:n producerar m.a.o. texter som på ett omedvetet sätt kommer att vara språkmodeller för sina läsare. Förändringar i språket kreeras inte och drivs inte på av språkforskare, utan av vanliga språkbrukare i interaktion med andra språkbrukare. Sett ur ett sociolingvistiskt perspektiv har det vitt spridda reklamspråket därför inflytande på språket i samhället. Syftet med det reklamspråksprojekt som presenteras i föreliggande rapport är att analysera hur och när förändringar i svenskan som uppträder i Sverige dyker upp i annonser som skrivs på svenska i Finland. Reklam på svenska Finland under 1900-talet står i fokus, och tidningsannonser för Stockmanns varuhus i Helsingfors utgör primärmaterialet. Tidningsannonser för varuhuset Nordiska Kompaniet (NK) i Stockholm under motsvarande tid tjänar som jämförelsematerial. I denna rapport presenteras projektets syfte, de uppställda forskningsfrågorna, och resonemanget illustreras med exempel ur projektmaterialet. Rapporten innehåller också en beskrivning av projektets reklamdatabas och basfakta om material och metoder. The advertising business is often said to favour a modern, innovative language use. This is a statement not easily verified. Newspaper ads are in fact the genre of written language that linguists have paid the least attention to. People writing texts for newspaper ads are individuals representing contemporary language use. Advertisements representing different periods therefore diverge not only regarding the change of style and form advertising undergoes over time, but changes in the language itself also reflect the continuous process of alteration in a speech community. Advertisements and marketing material on the whole, are also read by many individuals who otherwise are not accustomed to reading at all. The marketing manager, the copywriter and the Art Director, in other words, produce texts that unconsciously function as language models. Changes are not created by, or urged on by linguistic expertise, but by ordinary users confronting other ordinary users. From a sociolinguistic perspective the widely diffused advertising language is therefore a most influential factor. The aim of the present project is to analyze how and when changes in standard Swedish emerge in advertisement texts in Swedish in Finland. The basic material for this project consists of advertisements for the Stockmann Departement Store in Helsinki from the entire 20th century. The comparative material includes advertisements from the Swedish Department Store Nordiska Kompaniet (NK) in Stockholm from the corresponding period. In this report the aim of the project and its the basic research questions are presented and the reasoning is illustrated by examples from the collected material. The report also includes a description of the project’s advertisement database and presents facts about the material and methods.

Syftet med denna studie är att analysera avancerade finskspråkiga inlärares uttal av finlandssvenska i fritt tal: vilka är de svåraste inlärningsmålen i S2-uttal (andra- och främmande språk) och hurdana skillnader finns det mellan talare på olika färdighetsnivåer? Därtill undersöks om finskspråkiga lyssnare värderar uttalet på samma sätt som svenskspråkiga lyssnare. S2-talarnas prestationer i en monologuppgift värderas av finskspråkiga och svenskspråkiga lyssnare gällande hur bra talarna kan segment och prosodi i finlandssvenska. Forskning i finskspråkiga talares S2-uttal av finlandssvenska ger oss ett speciellt perspektiv på S2- uttalsinlärning. Eftersom språken liknar varandra fonetiskt bör svårigheterna inte vara alltför stora och inlärningen av ett inföddliknande uttal kan anses vara ett realistiskt mål. Uttalet sägs ju vara ett av de svåraste inlärningsmålen i S2 särskilt om inlärningen inte påbörjats mycket tidigt. Resultaten visar att S2-uttalet präglas av segmentella och prosodiska avvikelser även på de högsta färdighetsnivåerna. Skillnaderna mellan färdighetsnivåerna är störst i segment och satsprosodi. De svenskspråkiga lyssnarna är striktare i sina värderingar än de finskspråkiga lyssnarna. Utöver det teoretiska värdet för S2-uttalsinlärningsmodellerna kan resultaten utnyttjas i språkundervisning och i värdering av muntliga språkfärdigheter. This study examines advanced Finnish-speaking learners’ pronunciation of Finland-Swedish in free speech: what are the greatest difficulties in L2 (second and foreign language) pronunciation and how do speakers on different proficiency levels differ? Furthermore, it is of interest whether Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking listeners differ as pronunciation raters. The L2 speakers’ pronunciation in a monologue task is assessed by Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking listeners regarding segmental and suprasegmental features. Research on Finnish-speakers’ L2 pronunciation of Finland-Swedish gives us an interesting perspective on L2 pronunciation learning. Because the languages are phonetically similar, there should be no major difficulties and learning of a native-like pronunciation can be considered a realistic goal. Pronunciation is, however, regarded as one of the most difficult areas in L2 learning, particularly if learning has not been started at an early stage. Results show that L2 pronunciation is characterized by deviations in segments and prosody even on the highest proficiency levels. Differences between the proficiency levels are greatest for segments and sentence prosody. Swedish-speaking listeners give stricter ratings than Finnish-speaking listeners. Besides the theoretical value for L2 pronunciation learning models, the results also benefit language teaching and oral language skills assessment. peerReviewed

The purpose of this study was to investigate if fluently bilingual Finland-Swedish speakers have an accent in their Finnish, and whether this possible accent can be heard by native Finnish listeners. Furthermore, the aim was to investigate what acoustical features characterize a possible accent in the Finnish spoken by Finland-Swedish speakers. To answer these questions two studies were carried out: a listening test with 55 native Finnish listeners who were asked to categorize 20 speakers as native or nonnative speakers of Finnish, and if the speakers were regarded as non-native, how strong the speaker’s accent was: weak, moderate, or strong. The 20 speakers included native Finnish informants (4), Finland-Swedish speakers with Swedish as their L1 (15), and one speaker with Greek as his L1. The results of the listening test show that the Finland-Swedish speaker group is heterogeneous: roughly one-third of the speakers were categorized as native speakers of Finnish, another third of the speakers caused problems for the listeners as the speakers were almost equally often classified as 1) native speaker of Finnish or 2) a speaker with a weak accent. The last third of the speakers was by an overwhelming majority of listeners categorized as non-native Finns. The acoustical analysis shows that the most significant non-Finnish features were shortening of phonologically long syllables in unstressed position, and relatively short rhythmic phrases. peerReviewed