From: Håkan Lindgren
Message: 8296
Date: 2001-08-03
"Should a
study of language ignore recent arrivals who may have their own tongue
altered with loan words from the majority? Can the study of small groups
within a larger whole shed light on how borrowings affect definitions and
compound words?"The obvious, short answers to these questions are (1) "no" and (2) "yes". Jokes aside, these are serious questions that should best be answered by people who are more knowledgeable than me. Comments from other people on this list are welcome.
"How have newcomers, immigrants and cultural
imports, affected the Swedish language?"I'm only able to answer this with a short outline. As a small language in the outskirts of Europe we have, naturally, borrowed a lot of words. Until the last decades of the 20th century there has been no immigration to Sweden worth mentioning; we have usually borrowed words because of foreign cultural influence: from German because the Germans were our most powerful neighbours, from French during the French peak of influence (17th-18th centuries) and nowadays from American English. During the last few decades, however, there has been a lot of immigration to Sweden, for political or economical reasons. It is probably too early to tell how this will affect the Swedish language, the change is happening among the kids right now. Many immigrants are from countries like Turkey, Iran and Iraq; I don't think anybody knows how these languages will mix with Swedish. Some fear that this will lead to a kind of "suburb dialect" spoken by Swedish as well as immigrant kids, a dialect that will keep these kids forever locked in the suburbs, doomed to trash jobs or unemployment. The main influence on the kids seems still to be American English, that's where their slang is coming from.My guess is that immigrant minorities might have a very different impact on the language of the majority depending on their social status - some minorities are getting or demanding a lot of attention, while others quickly adopt and disappear. The million or so Swedes who emigrated to the United States did not leave any traces in American English that I am aware of.
"Have there been any studies on how the Swedish occupation of Finland
affected the Finnish language?"I'm sure there must be, though I do not know of any. When I look at Finnish texts I can recognise a few "international" loan words, such as "auto" (car), "presidentti" (president) but no apparent loans from Swedish. "Auto", for example, can not have been borrowed through Swedish, since "car" is called "bil" in Swedish (we borrowed the end of "automobile" and they the beginning). There are also a few recognisable loans from early Germanic ("kuningas", king, "saippua", soap, "ranta", beach - "strand" in many Germanic languages except for English). Swedish appears to have been more influenced by foreign languages than Finnish, which often prefers creating new words instead of borrowing (while many languages have the more or less international words "film" and "telephone", Finnish has "elokuva" and "puhelin")."Are there Swedish enclaves remaining in
Finland?"Yes. They're in the south part of Finland.
"Are there any Swedish ruled islands with Finnish inhabitants?"No, but the opposite exists: there's a group of islands (called Aland [Sw.] Ahvenanmaa [Fi.]) in the sea between Sweden and Finland with a Swedish-speaking population that is under Finnish rule. This is not a bone of contention between our countries: the Finnish laws are very generous toward the Swedish-speaking minority.Best regards,Hakan