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- Boyd, Sally, 1949, et al.
(author)
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Sociolinguistic practice among multilingual youth in Sweden and Canada
- 2011
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In: International symposium on bilingualism, 15-18 June, Oslo.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- 2.Sociolinguistic Practice Among Multilingual Youth in Sweden and Canada This paper addresses two interrelated questions about the sociolinguistic identity and language use of young people in multilingual urban settings. First, can such speakers be divided into different groups on the basis of their sociolinguistic identity and native-speaker status? Second, to what extent does use of the majority language by multilingual youth differ from that of other majority-language speakers? These questions are of broad sociolinguistic interest, contributing more generally to the question of the extent to which the increasingly multilingual nature of formerly monolingual cities has resulted in relatively new ways of speaking, and what role multilingual speakers play in the local speech community. In this paper, we use quantitative methods to compare and contrast the results of a study of three urban centres in Sweden (Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö) and one in Canada (Toronto). Findings of the studies in Sweden suggest that it is difficult not only to delineate homogeneous groups of speakers among multilingual urban youth, but also to find regular, cohesive patterns in sociolinguistic variation. Similarly, the Toronto study finds it difficult to delineate homogeneous groups, though speakers do seem to be distinguished on the basis of ethnic identity in their overall rates of use of certain variables. Some of these differences may be attributed to instantiations of and attitudes toward policies advocating multiculturalism in Sweden and Toronto. Taken together, the results of these studies suggest that new ways of speaking may be more fruitfully considered as a style of speech or an array of features selected from a pool of available resources for talk in certain contexts and for certain purposes, rather than as one or more ethnolects in the cities studied. These conclusions indicate that such ways of speaking are part and parcel of contemporary spoken Swedish and English. Summary: This paper compares identity and language use of youth in multilingual cities in Sweden and Canada. Examining speakers by (ethno)linguistic criteria and analysing linguistic variation, we find no homogeneous groupings, though some speakers may use particular styles or features as resources in certain contexts and for certain purposes.
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