Language and Social Class: Pronouns of Address in Swedish. Working Papers in Sociolinguistics, No. 29.

The Swedish address system is in a state of rapid change. Consequently, Swedes are now more than ever sensitive to the seeming lack of generally accepted rules of usage. This paper attempts to codify the rules for usage of the personal pronouns "du" and "ni." In so doing, it finds that "du" may be used to express either solidarity or intimacy-familiarity, while "ni" exists in old peasant form as well as in current polite and impolite forms. Generally speaking, one can describe the Swedish address system adequately only if one recognizes that Swedish social classes have different rules due to different semantics (i.e., the covariation between the pronoun used and the objective relationship existing between speaker and addressee) of the pronouns "du" and "ni." (Author/DB)