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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1231

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Assigning blame: new forms in Finnish and their association with urban youth language

Authors: Peterson, Elizabeth; Vaattovaara, Johanna
Submitted by: Peterson, Elizabeth (University of Helsinki, Finland)

This study focuses on a few innovative forms that are used in contemporary Finnish. These forms include pliis, which is borrowed from English ‘please,’ as well as the so-called “new” quotatives niinku, tyyliin, and sillee, which are similar in use to the English quotative ‘be like.’The acceptability and grammaticality of these forms was tested by distributing an online questionnaire, which was answered by 415 respondents from throughout Finland, with the majority (189 of the total respondents) from Oulu, in Northern Finland. Most of the respondents ranged in age from 20-30, with the youngest respondents being in the age group 15-19 and the oldest 60 years or older. Respondents were asked to evaluate a series of Finnish utterances containing the target forms with regard to the age and sex they associated with each utterance. Respondents were also asked to evaluate, on a Likert scale, if the test utterance was “acceptable Finnish.” In the form of open responses, respondents reported in what region they would expect to hear such an utterance and to comment on its overall acceptability. The goal of the study was to evaluate if these target forms are associated with influence from English, with geographical region, with urbanization, with youth language, or other social dimensions. The analysis of the data is currently underway, but the preliminary results demonstrate that each of the forms tested seems to be associated with youth language, English, and Finland’s capital region, Helsinki. Perhaps the most surprising finding from the study is the tendency to associate stigmatized or negatively evaluated forms with English, and this in turn with the Helsinki region. In this presentation, we will present the outcome of the respondents’ assessments of the sample utterances based on a quantitative analysis (using ANOVA), focusing on how Finnish speakers from different regions associate these new forms both socially and geographically. Based on the free-form answers to the questionnaire, we will present an indexical field (Eckert 2008) for each innovative form. While it is well established that acceptability tests are in many ways biased, a study of this nature allows us to investigate relatively unstudied forms and to evaluate their level of integration and stigmatization.

Eckert, Penelope (2008). Variation and the Indexical Field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (4): 453–476.