Dom-debatten och litteracitet

The Swedish debate regarding the reform of the third person pronoun plural has been examined with the NLS theory and with the perspective of literacy as not only a mental process but also as a social practice. The debate was initiated in autumn of 2016 by an article written by the teacher Henrik Birkebo in which he argued for a reform. To examine the legitimacy of the main arguments in the debate in relation to pupils’ actual use of the Swedish alternatives for the third person pronoun plural de/dem and dom in secondary school, 307 answers to the National Tests in Swedish and Swedish as a Second Language from 2015 has been quantified in a corpus. The result shows that the argument for a reform due to the hardship for pupils to make out the difference between de and dem sees literacy mainly as a mental process. This is not shown in the corpus. A minority cannot use de and dem as the norm requires, and this minority consists of pupils with high and low grades. The argument to not too hastily make a reform sees literacy as a social practice and as a performance in a social context. This is more likely to be true according to the results of the analysis of the corpus. 82 % of the pupils want to use de/dem which shows that this is seen as a more respected literacy than the use of dom, which only 6 % of the pupils use in the corpus.