Nathan J. Young | Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University
A new first-person pronoun has emerged in the vernacular of Stockholm Swedish. A loan from Turkish, benim is indexically self-aggrandizing and a feature of the male genderlect of Stockholm’s racialized proletariat. It is also typologically unusual by virtue of being a loanword in an abstract functional role, namely, a pronoun. I detail several factors that, in concert, allowed benim to enter into Swedish first as a naked prototype, then as a reanalysis of dissociative third-person constructions, and finally, as a productive first-person personal pronoun. I conclude further that the actuation of these factors was the unique social ecology of class and racial exclusion, which are generally known to drive symbolic status-moves among the subordinated.
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Cited by 1 other publications
Young, Nathan J.
2022. The Sociolectal and Stylistic Variability of Rhythm in Stockholm. Language and Speech 65:4 ► pp. 1034 ff.
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