Finland is officially a bilingual country, with Finnish and Swedish as national languages. FinlandSwedes constitute about 6% of the population. This study treats Finland Swedish in relation to Swedish in Sweden, on the one hand, and, onthe other hand, to Finnish. The main question is whether Finland Swedish should be regarded asa variety on a par with regional varieties in Sweden, which presupposes a common written standard, or as a more independent standard language. A corpus of 289 school essays written by compulsory- and upper-secondary-school students inFinland has been compared with school essays written by Swedes in Sweden. The number of provincial features in the essays provide a quantitative measure of the regional and age-related variation among the students. The purpose of the study is to determine whether the two groups of students are developing inthe same direction, toward a common supra-regional standard language in which provincialismsare rare. My hypothesis has been that the Finland-Swedish essays will reflect a different standardlanguage than in Sweden, which would imply that several of the so-called provincialisms belongto an implicit Finland-Swedish written standard. The results indicate that the upper-secondary students, just as in Sweden, use fewer provincialfeatures than do compulsory school students. Students from bilingual municipalities use more Finlandisms than do their cohorts who reside in more Swedish-speaking environments. In generalthese Finlandisms are more closely related to Finnish than to dialects of Swedish, which meansthat the provincialisms of the Finland-Swedish students are in many cases different in nature fromthose of their Swedish counterparts in Sweden. A comparison between Finland-Swedish studentsand Swedish students in Sweden indicates that the students in Finland use more provincialisms, onthe one hand, and, on the other hand, continue to use them at the upper-secondary level as well,which is rare among Swedish students in Sweden. The conclusion is that in a certain sense Finland Swedish can be regarded as an independentstandard language developed out of the interplay with its own dialects and with Finnish. However,regionally varied influence from Sweden, combined with active language-preservation measuresin cooperation with Swedish language planning bodies in Sweden, ensures that Finlandisms, especially in professional expository prose, are normally few in number and can be regarded as negligible, even by Swedish readers in Sweden.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-13 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Melin-Köpilä, Christina |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för nordiska språk, Uppsala : Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Skrifter / utgivna av Institutionen för nordiska språk vid Uppsala universitet, 0083-4661 ; 41 |
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