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Article published In:
Address from a World Perspective
Edited by Heinz L. Kretzenbacher, Catrin Norrby and Jane Warren
[Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 29:2] 2006
► pp. 18.1–18.15

Variation in Swedish address practices

| University of Melbourne

This article explores variation in address in contemporary Swedish in Sweden-Swedish and Finland-Swedish. The research is part of a large-scale Australian project on changes in the address systems of French, German and Swedish. The present article focuses on results from 72 social network interviews conducted in Sweden (Gothenburg) and Finland (Vaasa). Both quantitative results (questionnaire part) and qualitative results (interview part) are presented. The findings suggest that the V pronoun of address – ni – is gradually disappearing in both national varieties. This tendency is clearly stronger in Sweden-Swedish; in spoken Sweden-Swedish V hardly exists any more, except for a controversial re-entry in communication between the young and middleaged and the very old in service encounters (c.f. Mårtensson 1986). Furthermore the results indicate that there is considerable variation between written (impersonal) and spoken Sweden-Swedish with a much higher acceptance for the V pronoun in written, impersonal contexts. The study demonstrates that national variation is considerable with much more use of V in Finland-Swedish.

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 January 2006
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.2104/aral0618
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