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Aims and objectives: This study examines fennicisms (i.e., Finnish loanwords and calques) in Finland-Swedish, a Swedish variety spoken in Finland. We investigate how fennicism frequency relates to speakers' regional backgrounds and fluency in Finnish. Methodology: 134 participants from four regions in Finland performed a picture-naming task designed to elicit fennicisms. The participants also rated their own fluency in Finnish. Data and analysis: A regression analysis with the outcome variable of fennicism frequency and the predictors of region, fluency in Finnish, and gender was performed. Findings: Results show that speakers from the more bilingual regions of Southern Finland and Helsinki used significantly more fennicisms than speakers from Ostrobothnia or Swedish-speaking Åland. The study suggests that fluency in Finnish was a strong predictor for fennicism use, as speakers with low or moderate knowledge of Finnish used fewer fennicisms than speakers with high or native(-like) fluency. No significant effect of gender was found. Originality: While fennicisms are considered widespread in Finland-Swedish, there is little previous research on their use and distribution. Implications: The results demonstrate that while many of the fennicisms are well-established in the Finland-Swedish variety, their use is limited to certain groups and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normative ratings are a means to control for the effects of confounding variables in psycholinguistic experiments. This paper introduces a new dataset of normative ratings for Swedish encompassing 111 concrete nouns and the corresponding picture stimuli in the MultiPic database (Duñabeitia et al. 2017). The norms for name agreement, category typicality, age of acquisition and subjective frequency were collected using online surveys among native speakers of the Finland-Swedish variety of Swedish. The paper discusses the inter-correlations between these variables and compares them against available ratings for other languages. In doing so, the paper argues that ratings for age of acquisition and subjective frequency collected for other languages may be applied to psycholinguistic studies on Finland-Swedish, at least with respect to concrete and highly imageable nouns. In contrast, norms for name agreement should be collected from speakers of the same language variety as represented by the subjects in the actual experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A global crisis, like the Covid-19 pandemic, can change not only societies but also languages by a great input of new terminology. For speakers of a minority language, media is in a key position to provide them with these new words in their own language. In the case of Finland-Swedish, the Swedish media in Finland is helped by professional language advisers in this language planning task. This study analyses the media language management in Finland-Swedish media, through a content analysis of language recommendations published between February 2020 and April 2021, as well as interviews with media language advisers. The analysis shows that about a quarter of the language recommendations published during these 15 months are coronavirus-related. The topics in the recommendations follow the development of the outbreak in Finland, showing how closely the language advisers work with the news organizations. Contrary to normal situations, the Finland-Swedish media language advisers could not fully rely on the language recommendations from Sweden, due to their different Covid-19 strategies. Instead, the norm authorities were experts in ministries and official institutions, illustrating how language planning is done collectively. The Finland-Swedish journalists rely heavily on the media language recommendations, showing a certain linguistic insecurity, which according to Muhr (2012) is typical for speakers of non-dominant varieties of a pluricentric language.

This article examines regional and stylistic variation in the merger of front vowels /eː/ and /ɛː/ in Finland-Swedish. The study investigates the merger by comparing formant data from 141 speakers from four Swedish-speaking regions in Finland. Additionally, intraspeaker variation is explored by incorporating samples from three contextual styles. The results indicate cross-regional differences between Finland-Swedish dialects, with a more distinct variant of /ɛː/ being used on the monolingually Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, compared to other regions. However, the findings show that speakers from mainland Finland also demonstrate significantly different formant values for the vowels, particularly in formal speech styles. These results challenge the assumption of a complete /eː-ɛː/ merger in Finland-Swedish, instead pointing to a near-merger, whereby two sounds sound the same to speakers, despite them being differentiated in production. The findings also shed new light on stylistic variation in the variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]