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This article investigates forms and functions of multilingual practices among German-speaking expatriates in Finland in an online community. It focuses on Finnish codeswitches in otherwise German forum messages in a material that consists of 179 discussion threads with a total of 616 Finnish codeswitches. The structural analysis of the Finnish codeswitches revealed that most of the Finnish codeswitches were intrasentential switches - most often common and proper nouns. Switches of other parts of speech such as verbs and adjectives occurred significantly less often. Almost half of the Finnish nouns were orthographically adapted into German through capitalisation of the initial letter. The functional analysis showed that codeswitches referring to Finnish culture and society were common. Other central functions included metalinguistic commentary, slips of the tongue, greetings and closings, reported speech, and reiteration. The forum members largely relied on their shared knowledge of Finnish and Finland, and only some codeswitches were translated into German. The findings of this study indicate that Finnish codeswitches are an expression of the multicultural and multilingual lives and identities of the forum members. Codeswitching to Finnish serves both as a means of communicating their shared Finnish experience and as a signal of membership in the online community.

Current literature tends to see cosmopolitan identity formation as an individual endeavour of developing a stance of openness, and transcending discourses of national and other cultural identities. This article challenges the essentialism inherent in this model by proposing a different framing of cosmopolitan identity formation that shifts the focus to how people collectively mobilize cosmopolitanism as a resource for cultural identity construction. The article is based on an anthropological study of transnational professionals who are part of a diverse expatriate community in Amsterdam. The analysis shows how these professionals draw on cosmopolitanism to define themselves as ‘non-nationals’. This involves downplaying national affiliations and cultural differences while also marking national identity categories and ‘cultural features’ to maintain the difference they collectively embrace. This, however, does not imply openness to all otherness. Boundary drawing to demarcate the cosmopolitan ‘us’ in relation to national (mono)culture is equally important. The article argues that cosmopolitan identities are socially accomplished as particular modes of collective belonging that are part of – not beyond – a global discursive sphere of identity politics.

Denna uppsats undersöker de rums- och identitets(re)konstruktioner som sker i mötet med De Andra. Semistrukturerade djupintervjuer med elva personer som har erfarenhet av arbete i postkolonial miljö – i detta fall Tanzania - samt platsobservation av ett så kallat ”expatriate community” ger empiri som analyseras med en dekonstruktiv intersektionell ansats. Studien visar att identitetsmarkörer korsas och skapar identitets(re)konstruktioner. Processen framkallar det objekt som inte tillhör det egna Jaget och skapar ett Dem – samtidigt som det sker omförhandlingar beträffande hemlandet och dess invånare. Det uppstår både ett avståndstagande och ett närmande till det som ses som ”svenskt” eller ”skandinaviskt”. Representationer skapas och förhandlingar sker mellan lokalbefolkning och expatriates men även inom den vita gruppen, baserat på faktorer som utbildning, ålder, inkomst, familjekonstellation, tid i landet och yrkestillhörighet. Detta påverkar rummet – i form av sociala rum såväl som konkreta platser. En slutsats är att intersektionalitet är ett användbart instrument för att se hur olika identitetsmarkörer (re)konstrueras i tid och rum – att vara ”vit” och ”svensk” är inte samma sak ”här” som ”där”. Den svenska kolonin i Tanzania kan inte ses som en homogen grupp, varvid denna studie bidrar till ökad förståelse för den diversitet som präglar den privilegierade transnationella arbetskraften – expatriates.