Research on Language in Multilingual Urban Settings in Sweden S. BOYD

Introduction

This chapter gives a brief overview of research on language in multilingual urban settings in Sweden. It also describes a large-scale project that was carried out in the early 2000s on the language of young people in such settings (cf. Bijvoet & Fraurud; Boden; Ekberg; Ganuza; Kallstrom, this volume).

Sweden has a relatively large proportion of persons born abroad among its inhabitants. Many live in the three largest cities of Sweden, where much of the research on this topic has been carried out. See Table 1.1 for a summary of the proportions of population born abroad in Sweden as a whole and in its three major cities, which are also the cities studied in the project mentioned above.

Research in Sweden on language in multilingual urban communities, in the broad sense, has been carried out since at least the 1970s including both research on Swedish and research on the languages brought to Sweden by post World War II migrants. Research whose focus is on the Swedish language in its role as a second language, target language or the like has dominated, but other research, especially on Finnish, has been pursued continuously since at least the 1980s (e.g. Huss, 1991; Lainio, 1989). Few studies have been carried out on both the majority language and the immigrant minority languages, and on the entire linguistic repertoire of the multiethnic community. There have also been few studies on early bilingual development in multilingual families. Research on language maintenance and shift has been carried out on the language use of multilinguals generally (Boyd, 1985) and on groups with specific origins (e.g. Bani-Shoraka, 2005; Gyorgy, 2010). These and other studies have documented a language shift among the children of immigrants, and looked at different factors affecting the degree and speed of the language shift.

Research specifically on Swedish among multilinguals can in turn be divided into two major strands. The first major strand is more psycholinguistically oriented research on the learning or acquisition of Swedish as a second language, which started at least as early as Hyltenstam (1978) and includes numerous studies not only within linguistics but also within pedagogy and other disciplines. The second is more sociolinguistically oriented research on multilingualism in Sweden, with a focus on Swedish as used by immigrants or their children. A major research project started in 2000 (SUF) attempted to combine these two strands of research. The remainder of my brief overview will concern research on Swedish and research with primarily a sociolinguistic perspective, but excluding research on language maintenance and research on code-switching (e.g. Park, 2000). It will also give a brief description of the SUF project.

Sociolinguistic Research on Language in Multilingual Communities

The sociolinguistic strand of research has been devoted to several issues, including at least the following: (1) variation in the Swedish spoken by immigrants and their children and to the question of how their language use should be regarded (e.g. as a new dialect, slang, style or the like); (2) attitudes toward multilinguals' use of (primarily) Swedish; and (3) language and identity among young multilinguals.

Sociolinguistically-oriented studies of 'foreign sounding' varieties of Swedish were carried out primarily by Kotsinas at Stockholm University. In her dissertation, Kotsinas (1982) analyzes the language of adult immigrants and finds interesting similarities between this untutored learner language and pidgin languages. In later papers, she coins the term Rinkeby Swedish for the speech of young multilinguals and tries out various labels for it. As the adult language is allegedly pidgin-like, she both rejects (Kotsinas, 1988, 1998) and then accepts (Kotsinas, 2001) the label creole or creoloid, in other papers she considers it potentially as a dialect of Swedish (Kotsinas, 1988), and as a youth variety or slang (Kotsinas, 1994, 1998). Kotsinas documents a number of features of the Swedish of adult and younger multilinguals in the Stockholm area, documenting observations based on transcribed examples. Although she has emphasized the fact that the alleged variety is extremely variable in itself (Kotsinas, 1994: 132), her work has tended to confirm stereotypes that these features are more prevalent in the speech of multilinguals than some of them in fact turn out to be (Ganuza, 2008, this volume).

Studies have also been carried out of attitudes toward Swedish as spoken by immigrants and their children (e.g. Cunningham-Andersson, 1993; Cunningham-Andersson & Engstrand, 1988; Jahani, 1999). Bijvoet (1998) treats attitudes not only to different mono- and multilingual speakers' use of Swedish, but also to mono- and multilingual Finnish in Sweden and Finland. Boyd (2004) studies attitudes toward accented Swedish in the context of the Swedish school. Bijvoet and Fraurud (this volume) are currently looking at the meaning of labels such as Rinkeby Swedish among different members of the speech community of Stockholm.

In recent years, a number of doctoral dissertations have been published studying the development of identity among...