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Urban Matters: Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics
Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 179–202

New and old social meanings in urban and rural Sweden

The changing indexicalities of damped /i/

ORCID logo | Institute for Language and Folklore, Sweden
ORCID logo | Institute for Language and Folklore, Sweden
 | Institute for Language and Folklore, Sweden
 | Institute for Language and Folklore, Sweden
In this study, we focus on the use of [ɨ:] (sometimes referred to as damped /i/). This variant has different connotations in different parts of Sweden. In some rural areas, it has traditionally indexed place, whereas it has indexed class and gender in Sweden’s second largest city Gothenburg (Bruce 2010, Gross 2018, Svahn & Nilsson 2014). Previous studies have shown that in the urbanization of Sweden, the urban variant [ɨ:] has spread from city centers to other locations in Sweden. In the process, it has begun to index urbanity and modernity (see e.g. Svahn & Nilsson 2014). But what happens to this feature in urban Gothenburg where it traditionally has indexed class and gender alongside place? Does the changing social meaning in other locations also affect Gothenburg?
Keywords: indexicality, damped /i/, urban vs rural, perception, Implicit Association Test (IAT), production, language attitudes, class, place, authenticity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The damped /i/
  • 3.Phonological change and changing indexicalities
  • 4.Data and methods
    • 4.1Locations and dialects: Gothenburg and Skärhamn
    • 4.2The informants
    • 4.3The production test
    • 4.4The Implicit Association Test (IAT)
    • 4.5The attitude interviews
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Results of the production test
    • 5.2Results of the IAT
    • 5.3Results of the attitude interviews
  • 6.Summary and discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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

Published online: 16 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.27.08nil
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Persson, Anna
2024. The acoustic characteristics of Swedish vowels. Phonetica DOI logo

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