This essay aims to give an overview of the function and incorporation of English into the Swedish language in the present day. To do this I have compiled previous studies from the last few years about the presence of English in Sweden, code switching between the languages and the purpose it serves as well as loanwords and their formal integration into Swedish structures and written conventions. It also includes an empirical study exploring the Swedish orthographical adaptation of loans with English origin and the usage frequency of the foreign versus the adapted form of the same words in informal writing on the internet. The words chosen for the study have a Swedish orthographically adapted form on Språkrådets “new-word-lists” between 1986 and 2020, and the search itself was done using Språkbankens Korps large social media based corpus. The majority of the words included in the study were more frequently used with the foreign spelling of the word stem even when they were used with Swedish suffixes, showing that English is often incorporated and accepted into Swedish morphosyntax. Overall English can be concluded to play a significant role in the Swedish speaking community and is in practice more like a second language than a foreign one. In multiple language domains it is used parallel to Swedish and code switching is quite common among young people and in less formal or structured settings. It is mostly used as a stylistic tool and an act of identity creation, but also as a linguistic resource for complementing Swedish. Loanwords are often morphologically adapted but still used together with word stems with English spelling, showing that English language features can be accepted and quite frequently used inside a Swedish grammatical frame.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-508917 |
Date | January 2023 |
Creators | Svensson, Felicia |
Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik och filologi |
Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
Language | Swedish |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
Format | application/pdf |
Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0027 seconds