What's the target? A folk linguistic study of young Stockholmers’ constructions of linguistic norm and variation

ABSTRACT

To account for the full range of language use in contemporary multilingual urban contexts, the notion of target language (TL) needs to be reconsidered. In studies of second language acquisition and language variation, taking TL for granted implies that people agree on what constitutes ‘good’ language, or the standard norm. The TL of language learners and users is, however, more heterogeneous than is often assumed. To gain insight into what people are actually targeting in their language development and use, we need to study their perceptions of ambient sociolinguistic variation. In this folk linguistic listener study involving 343 upper secondary school students, a range of data types were analysed: attitude scales, variety labelling, and assessments of speakers’ social and linguistic backgrounds. This article highlights some results pointing to a considerable divergence in the listeners’ perceptions, in particular with regard to speech representing what is here characterised as migration-related social dialects. Several listeners labelled these samples as ‘good’ Swedish, possibly suggesting that they do not simply aim at or even relate to a TL identical with the dominating monolingual norm, but may instead have a less narrow view of the kind of Swedish they consider appropriate for use in more formal situations.

KEYWORDS:

• target language
• sociolinguistic awareness
• migration-related language variation
• folk linguistics
• perceptions of language variation

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all upper secondary school students participating in our study as speakers or listeners, as well as their teachers and school directors. We are grateful to colleagues at Stockholm University and Uppsala University, for discussions on theory and method. Thanks are due also to two anonymous Language Awareness reviewers and the editors of this special issue for comments on an earlier version of this article, and to Lamont Antieau for correcting our English. We are of course solely responsible for all the remaining deficiencies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the Swedish context, the word suburban has clear multiethnic connotations, especially in discourse about language issues.

2. Just like us, Young uses the label suburban Swedish, but in a broader sense than we do in the present article.

3. See, e.g. the collections of work in Stenström and Jørgensen (2009), Madsen, Spindler Møller, and Jørgensen (2010), Quist and Svendsen (2010), Kern and Selting (2011), and Nortier and Svendsen (2015).

4. Here and in the following, all names of participants are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this article was funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation [grant M2005-0459].

Notes on contributors

Ellen Bijvoet

Ellen Bijvoet has a PhD in Scandinavian languages and is an associate professor in research on bilingualism at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research and publications focus on bilingualism, minority languages, language attitudes, folk linguistics, and young peoples’ language and language use in multilingual contexts.

Kari Fraurud

Kari Fraurud has a PhD in general linguistics and is Professor Emerita in bilingualism at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests spans over discourse reference, language typology, minority languages, multilingualism, language attitudes and folk linguistics. Her recent publications focus on language variation in multilingual Stockholm.