This article uses contemporary Swedish fiction to explore sociolinguistic phenomena, and argues that literature constitutes an important arena for studying the (re)production and circulation of sociolinguistic experiences and ideas at a particular time and place. It builds on qualitative analysis of 65 Swedish books, published between 2000 and 2020, which depict protagonists with multilingual and migrant backgrounds. The study examines patterns of repetition in these works of fiction. It foregrounds recurring sociolinguistic experiences that are made relevant in the depiction of the fictional characters’ lives, and how they are emotionally interpreted. The analysis shows that the narrated experiences are often told and organized in similar ways and they tend to use the same social images of speakers to highlight processes of boundary-making and social differentiation. Language is used as an important part of the entextualization of these social experiences. For example, the authors often depict “the immigrant” and “the Swede” as binary opposites, which are linked to certain typical forms of speaking and being. By way of repetition, we argue, these recurring fictional experiences contribute to the formation of a grander narrative about language, belonging and social boundary-making in contemporary Sweden, and to the construction of Sweden as a society that is increasingly segregated and stratified.

This article explores practices of evaluation in academic recruitment in Swedish as a Second Language (SSL), an expanding and transdisciplinary subject area. As is common elsewhere, Swedish academia relies on a tradition of external expert review intended to ensure a meritocratic pro- cess. Here, we present an analysis of 109 written expert reports concerning recruitment to 57 positions in SSL during 2000–20. Because SSL lacks institutional autonomy, and is spread across several sub-disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the material encompasses experts with diverse academic backgrounds. The SSL reports are broadly characterized by qualitative assessment. In contrast to other fields, the SSL experts seldom use quantitative proxy measures. Instead, they mainly rely on received conceptions of the boundaries of SSL as a means of justifying their inclusion and exclusion of candidates. This dominant regularity consists of attempts to define and delimit SSL and its core re- search areas, to locate the candidates in a core-to-periphery scheme with respect to these boundaries, and to rank them accordingly. This mech- anism of social closure serves to restrict access to SSL to candidates with qualifications that conform to the experts’ own conceptions of SSL. As we show, the experts’ internally ambiguous conceptions of SSL tend to be constructed in relation to their own scientific habitus and invest- ments. Beyond evaluating applicants’ possession of scientific capital, their distinctive style of reasoning around research qualifications and skills thus involves power-laden boundary-work, which leaves ample room for individual, yet habitus-specific arbitrariness. 

This paper explores the link between the metaphoric structure TIME IS SPACE and time perception in bilinguals. While there appear to be fundamental commonalities in the way humans perceive and experience time regardless of language background, language-specific spatiotemporal metaphors can give rise to differences between populations, under certain conditions. Little is known, however, about how bilinguals experience time, and the specific factors that may modulate bilingual temporal processing. Here, we address this gap by examining L1 Spanish – L2 Swedish bilinguals in a psychophysical task. Results show that duration estimation of dynamic spatial configurations analogous to L2-specific temporal metaphors is modulated by L2 proficiency. In contrast, duration estimation of spatial configurations analogous to the L1 metaphorical expressions appears to be modulated by the age of L2 acquisition. These findings are discussed in terms of associative learning and cognitive restructuring in the bilingual mind.

This video-ethnographic study explores how professional actors and a director at the end of a theatrical rehearsal process coordinate transitions between rehearsed scenes. This is done through the development and use of cues, that is, ‘signals for action’. The aim is to understand how cues are developed and how timing in transitions is achieved by using the designed cues. Work on three different scene transitions is analysed using multimodal Conversation Analysis. The results show that cueing is a central tool for developing well-timed transitions, and how cues serve different purposes in the developing performance. There is no prior plan for how to achieve timely transitions. In all the analysed examples, it is an actor who must produce or act on the given cue who insists on its precise definition, followed by a negotiation on candidate cues, confirmation and specifying the cue. It is also actors who are primarily responsible for the timing of transitions, and the timing is solved through an interplay of clear-cut and embodied actions that allow for temporal variance. Cues are reflexively linked to actors’ observation and interpretation of other actors’ actions, which prevents a mechanical determination of timing in scene transition.

The theme of this study is the linguistic experiences of inter-Scandinavian communication. More specifically, using language portraits as a method, the study maps the linguistic experiences of two individuals who have moved from Denmark to Sweden as adults, and who now speak in a manner that generally passes as Swedish. The focus of the present study, however, is not these individuals’ acquisition of the Swedish language but their experiences of friction between differing ways of evaluating interaction in the two countries. Several of the individuals’ narrated experiences illustrate how utterances which in Denmark are perceived as witty and humorous are perceived as vulgar and aggressive in Sweden. The individuals’ experiences and the sociolinguistic implications of them are analyzed using notions and perspectives from Pierre Bourdieu – in particular, the notions of linguistic habitus and linguistic market are used – along with the notion of Spracherleben, developed by Brigitta Busch. The study illuminates that even though Danish and Swedish are closely related languages, there are significant differences in the pragmatic logic that prevail in the linguistic markets of the two countries, and that these differences generate critical effects on the linguistic experiences of these mobile individuals.

This article is centred on the tendency to align education for newly arrived students with migration policy. Drawing on an in‐depth analysis of interviews with four adult migrant students, we aim to investigate how the participants’ experiences of studying and how they imagine their future intersect with their immigration status. The interviews were conducted when they were first studying a language introduction programme, and then three years later. We focus on the participants’ nar‐ ratives about transitions within the education system and later into the labour market. Using Sara Ahmed’s approach to the orientation of subjects in time and space, the analysis shows that all students expressed a desire to “be in line,” meaning finishing their studies and finding employment. Students with temporary and conditional residence permits were directed towards specific vocational tracks and sectors of the labour market. Migrant students are a heterogenous group and, based on the findings presented, we argue that immigration status constitutes a crucial part of this heterogeneity, influencing how students imagine their future in a new society.

A series of recent studies have shown that the once-assumed cognitive advantage of bilingualism finds little support in the evidence available to date. Surprisingly, however, the view that bilingualism incurs linguistic costs (the so-called lexical deficit) has not yet been subjected to the same degree of scrutiny, despite its centrality for our understanding of the human capacity for language. The current study implemented a comprehensive meta-analysis to address this gap. By analyzing 478 effect sizes from 130 studies on expressive vocabulary, we found that observed lexical deficits could not be attributed to bilingualism: Simultaneous bilinguals (who acquired both languages from birth) did not exhibit any lexical deficit, nor did sequential bilinguals (who acquired one language from birth and a second language after that) when tested in their mother tongue. Instead, systematic evidence for a lexical deficit was found among sequential bilinguals when tested in their second language, and more so for late than for early second language learners. This result suggests that a lexical deficit may be a phenomenon of second language acquisition rather than bilingualism per se.

Vill du veta både vad som är språkligt rätt – och kunna förklara varför? Då erbjuder en nyutkommen bok en utmärkt fördjupning i ämnet.

Få genrer har så tydliga ramar som dödsannonser. Men även om språket i annonserna förändras mycket långsamt så har användningen av symbolerna ändrats rejält.

Även om erkännandet av minoritetsspråken i Sverige var viktigt så krävs det mycket mer för att få de olika språken som lyder under skilda villkor att leva.

Talkers vary in the phonetic realization of their vowels. One influential hypothesis holds that listeners overcome this inter-talker variability through pre-linguistic auditory mechanisms that normalize the acoustic or phonetic cues that form the input to speech recognition. Dozens of competing normalization accounts exist-including both accounts specific to vowel perception and general purpose accounts that can be applied to any type of cue. We add to the cross-linguistic literature on this matter by comparing normalization accounts against a new phonetically annotated vowel database of Swedish, a language with a particularly dense vowel inventory of 21 vowels differing in quality and quantity. We evaluate normalization accounts on how they differ in predicted consequences for perception. The results indicate that the best performing accounts either center or standardize formants by talker. The study also suggests that general purpose accounts perform as well as vowel-specific accounts, and that vowel normalization operates in both temporal and spectral domains.

We propose a rapid adaptation of FAVE-Align to the Nordic languages, and we offer our own adaptation to Swedish as a template. This study is motivated by the fact that researchers of lesser-studied languages often neither have sufficient speech material nor sufficient time to train a forced aligner. Faced with a similar problem, we made a limited number of surface changes to FAVE-Align so that it – along with its original hidden Markov models for English – could be used on Stockholm Swedish. We tested the performance of this prototype on the three main sociolects of Stockholm Swedish and found that read-aloud alignments met all of the minimal benchmarks set by the literature. Spontaneous-speech alignments met three of the four minimal benchmarks. We conclude that an adaptation such as ours would especially suit laboratory experiments in Nordic phonetics that rely on elicited speech.

Risk communication is widely researched in the social sciences, but in linguistics the study of how risk is communicated has not yet formed a coherent field of its own. In this chapter, we approach risk from a discourse perspective, aiming to promote the establishment of risk discourse as a field of study with its own characteristics. We approach the question “What is “risk”?” through a discourse-linguistic analysis that crucially involves the concept of responsibility. We show that there is a body of previous research in linguistics that has dealt with some aspect of risk, but typically without foregrounding risk or using risk as an analytical tool. We show how this state of affairs also applies to responsibility. We argue that an understanding of discourse about risk and risk scenarios needs to be informed by an understanding of the concept of responsibility. The theoretical point of this chapter is therefore to conceive of and establish this type of responsibility-embedded Risk Discourse. Throughout the chapter, we discuss ways in which risk and responsibility can serve as analytical tools in risk discourse studies. This is illustrated by reference not only to previous research, but also to the chapters included in the current volume.

This thesis seeks to contribute to the body of ethnographically-oriented semiotic landscape research by addressing linguistic and non-linguistic signs in the landscapes of contemporary Crimea. It is based on research conducted in the region back in 2017 and 2019 after the Russian annexation but before the full-scale war against Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022. It illuminates the ways in which the complex histories of conflict over the Crimean Peninsula are materialized in ‘absenced’ semiotic landscapes, both in the form of material effects in landscapes and as discursively realized in the narrated memories of the study participants. In this way, through a close theoretically informed analysis of absence in semiotic landscapes, this thesis illuminates the interrelationships between overwritten, erased and invisibilized voices.

Each of the four studies in this thesis addresses the effects of different acts of dispossession which have led to the absencing of ethnic, linguistic and national differences in Crimea across time and space. Study I engages with multilingual representations displayed in the city of Sevastopol, illustrating the dominance of Russian discourses of nation and nationalism. Moving beyond the focus on visible signs, Study II sheds light on the invisibilized histories of Crimean Tatar territorial dispossession and displacement. By engaging with the participants’ voices, it illustrates the constructions of a space of otherwise, an indeterminate space full of potentiality and marginality that remains hidden yet persistent in Crimean landscapes. Study III engages to a greater extent with acts of struggle for voice and visibility by attending to memories of citizens’ resistance through the lens of turbulence. Finally, Study IV attempts to disentangle the materially manifested effects of absence in the landscapes. This interrogation goes beyond words and captures voids and their haunting effects on the researcher’s subjectivities. 

Overall, this thesis contributes to the study of absencing and haunting in Crimean semiotic landscapes, understanding them as a historically layered and yet temporally dynamic, affective and vibrant social phenomenon. As evident from the emic perspectives presented in the thesis, absenced semiotic landscapes are intricately tied to people and events, and can therefore be treated as manifestations of human displacement and dispossession. Further, an (auto)-ethnographic account shows how embodied experiences of absenced semiotic landscapes matter as they further allow the illumination of memory, space and the production of situated knowledge woven into the individual’s body and subjectivity. In sum, the thesis offers a new lens on semiotic landscapes, one that explores the mutual co-constitution of material-discursive processes hidden behind words and voids. In this way, it opens up an endless web of interconnections that informs the ways in which we make sense of social life. 

The purpose of the study is to improve knowledge on teaching about academic text practice in the school subject of Swedish in upper secondary school. The study focuses on the conditions offered to students to approach this text practice and on students’ meaning-making about academic writing and academic text. The investigation has been conducted in the form of a case study in an upper secondary school class during the one year course ‘Swedish 3’. Ethnographic methods were used for data collection and the empirical material consists of classroom observations of text talk, interviews and focus group discussions with students and texts used in class. Theoretically, the study is based on socio-cultural and dialogic perspectives on language, learning and meaning-making (Wertsch 1998, Linell 2009). Students’ learning is seen as a process of appropriation and the texts used in teaching and text talk are seen as mediating resources that enable the students to make sense of academic text as a genre. The concepts ‘recontextualization’, ‘positioning’ and ‘boundary object’ are used in the analysis of the students’ meaning-making. The results show that the students’ meaning-making is characterized by ideas about objectivity and that the report genre is regarded as a norm för academic text. The results also show a complexity in the students’ appropriation process. The students use different recontextualizations of the objectivity concept in a relatively restricted way. In combination with dichotomies used in their meaning-making this prevents an inclusive understanding of genre offered in the teaching context from being fully realized. In addition, the results show challenges in the form of uncertainty regarding their own voice and the role of argumentation in texts of an academic character. However, there are also indications that students at the end of the course had a more nuanced understanding of genre, which involved regarding academic text in a wider perspective and aproaching the “rules” for academic writing more freely. Other results indicate that the texts used in the teaching have a potential to act as boundary objects (Star 2010) and facilitate the students’ crossing of borders between different understandings of genre as well as between text practices in school and higher education. One conclusion is that the purposes and functions of academic texts, as well as the processes behind their production, needs to be more explicit in order to facilitate the students’ appropriation process.

”Skriv klart, skriv enkelt, skriv kort, skriv svenska!” var Erik Wellanders paroll. Som språkspaltskrönikör och som författare till klassikern ”Riktig svenska” gick han till attack mot det tillkrånglade byråkratspråket.

Inom det snabbt växande vegetariska sortimentet i matbutikerna frodas teleskoporden, ord som skapas när två självständiga ord dras ihop och mitten försvinner.

This thesis aims to shed light on the presence of the Old Swedish courtly literature in the changing profane textual landscape of medieval Sweden to better understand the function and significance of this literature. The point of departure for this study are the three verse romances collectively known as the Eufemiavisor and their properties in their capacity as courtly literature. The material consists of 31 profane literary works and 26 manuscripts produced between 1300 and 1529. The study draws on polysystem theory (Even-Zohar 1990) and makes use of notions and approaches from various fields of textual scholarship such as philology and the history of literature.

The study is divided into three main parts. The first part focuses on the work perspective and structures the development of the Old Swedish profane textual landscape into four stages: introduction and establishment; diversification and expansion; politicizing and centralisation; and further development and administration of literary traditions. The second part, which analyses the use of a courtly repertoire in the corpus, uses these stages to interpret the results. The courtly repertoire is defined as a set of properties manifested in the Eufemiavisor. The properties included in the analysis are a courtly vocabulary, certain expressions, the form Knittelvers, adventure as a theme, and the intratextual temporal and spatial settings. The analysis shows that certain parts of the repertoire quickly become obsolete while others (such as a core vocabulary and the Knittelvers) remain productive until the end of the Middle Ages but gradually transform into stereotypes or evolve to become useful outside of a courtly literary context. The third part focuses on the manuscript perspective. A network analysis of the texts’ appearances in manuscripts shows that even though the Eufemiavisor had a central position, the rhyme chronicle Erikskrönikan could be considered the central node connecting various interests and textual orientations, keeping the chronicle relevant throughout the Middle Ages. The analysis of the transmission of the Eufemiavisor reveals their dynamic and multifunctional nature. Of the three romances, Hertig Fredrik av Normandie is perhaps the most nuanced, a factor that may have contributed to it being the most copied as well as the longest-lasting of the Eufemiavisor.

The results suggest a gradual move of the courtly repertoire from a central position towards a peripheral position in the literary system as a consequence of a growing system, new interests, and new groups governing the system. By the end of the Middle Ages, the function of the courtly repertoire appears to have become one of preservation of traditional literary taste.

Research articles on language aptitude, both past and recent, nearly without exception start off with a summative definition of the construct itself, declaring that language aptitude is generally considered to be a largely innate and relatively fixed talent that is relatively independent of other internal and external factors. Strangely enough, and as recently pointed out by several researchers (e.g., Chalmers, 2017; Li, 2016; Wen, Biedroń, & Skehan, 2017), this characterization of the nature and origin of language aptitude has rarely been challenged theoretically, let alone investigated empirically. In their overview, Wen, Biedroń, and Skehan (2017) contended that even though research methods have changed significantly in recent years, our knowledge about language aptitude itself “has not developed much at all since it started some 50 years ago,” summarizing that “the concept has remained intact – a relatively fixed trait that is not subject to malleability by later learning experience” (p. 6.). In other words, while empirical research on language aptitude has shifted its focus tremendously during the past 20 years, from the four-componential (black box-like) Carrollian paradigm (e.g., Carroll, 1958, 1962, 1973, 1981; Carroll&Sapon, 1959) to the more open-ended (Pandora’s box-like) “aptitude complexes” framework (e.g., Doughty, 2019; Linck et al., 2013; Robinson, 1997; 2002; Snow, 1994; Sparks et al., 2011), the traditional branding of language aptitude as a largely innate and relatively stable trait has stubbornly persisted. Unfortunately, this persistence not only runs the risk of fueling the already next-to-mystical reputation of language aptitude, but it also seems to have turned the concepts of innateness and stability into an ever-growing elephant in the room. Chalmers (2017) was right in stating that these issues have been grossly neglected, especially in the light of other developments in the field, and we agree with his conclusion that “with new ways of understanding L2 aptitude more holistically [. . .] and some researchers questioning Carroll’s original thinking [. . .], now seems an appropriate time to revisit the issues of stability and untrainability in L2 aptitude” (p. 93).

In this contribution, we explore the question of whether there is reason to maintain the traditional view of language aptitude as a relatively fixed trait that is resistant to experience, or if it should instead be seen as a rather flexible and acquirable skill. We compare the relative experiential effects of (1) having learned an L2 and having been a long-term functional and fluent bilingual in adulthood with (2) having lived with total visual deprivation for a significant period of life. Both bilingualism and visual loss have been reported to have enhancing effects on language-related as well as non-linguistic cognition, but few studies have focused on their effects on language aptitude specifically, especially in the case of blindness. The chapter closes with a discussion on what it would mean for current views on the role of age of L2 acquisition and critical period(s) if the above-average language aptitude hitherto robustly associated with adult near-native L2 learning should turn out to be nothing but an effect of L2 learning itself.