Att göra förort: Om språkliga resurser hos gymnasieungdomar med mångspråkig förortsbakgrund

Staging Suburbness : Linguistic resources of adolescents with a multilingual urban background (Engelska)

This thesis deals with positionality among adolescents from multilingual urban areas, and the construction of “suberbness”. Suburb, as in “suberbness”, refers to multilingual, socioeconomically disadvantaged areas in the outskirts of Swedish urban districts. The aim is to shed light on the positionality process, and linguistic practices are in focus. This inevitably raises the question of how language can be described without presenting it as a stable and fixed entity. The embodiment of the suburb, i.e. how one “becomes” the suburb, is discussed, also taking non-linguistic resources (e.g. clothing, music preference) in account.

The thesis contributes to the field of linguistic ethnography. Nineteen adol­escents, one school class, have been followed for one and a half years through fieldwork, mostly in, but also outside, school. The vast majority of them are self-identified girls. Even if linguistic ethnography emphasizes that language is elusive, fluid and ever-changing, the labels suburban slang and suburban Swedish are used in the description of the participants’ speech. The first label refers to slang-based linguistic practices associated with multi­lingual urban areas; the latter to a more standardized Swedish with a sound of suburbia, which can be described as a sociodialect. The labels are used to draw attention to nuances in suburban-indexed speech, ranging from informal to formal ways of speaking.

The participants in the study mainly position themselves in relation to majority-background adolescents, who are portrayed as different in e.g. speech style, interests and religious beliefs. A main result of the study is that the parti­ci­pants “sound suburban” in all examined contexts, e.g. school presen­tations, a job interview and everyday small talk, i.e. they shift between informal suburban slang and the more formal suburban Swedish. Their linguistic practices associated with multilingual urban areas are important for their position as suburban-anchored youth.