{"title":"Turning talk into text: the representation of contemporary urban vernaculars in Swedish fiction","authors":"Natalia Ganuza, Maria Rydell","doi":"10.1515/text-2023-0084","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the literary representation of contemporary urban vernaculars (CUV) in fiction. It focuses specifically on four Swedish novels published in the last ten years, whose narratives are set in the urban and increasingly multilingual, migrant-rich and class-stratified peripheral areas of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The analysis centers on how they are situated in these urban peripheries, using written representations of spoken, non-standard Swedish CUV as symbolic resources to give authenticity to the narratives. We examine the distinctive linguistic features that are employed to evoke the imagination of CUV, and how these are used to build the fictional characters and to create certain recognizable social personas and practices. We also discuss the linguistic features that are available but are not exploited to represent the fictional characters’ ways of speaking, and possible reasons why this is so. Finally, we examine how the novels exploit contrasts between registers, particularly between CUV and adult second-language speaker styles and between CUV and standard Swedish, and with what effects. The findings are discussed in the context of the broader social discourses about language, migration, CUV and adult second-language speakers in present-day Sweden.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Text & Talk","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2023-0084","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article examines the literary representation of contemporary urban vernaculars (CUV) in fiction. It focuses specifically on four Swedish novels published in the last ten years, whose narratives are set in the urban and increasingly multilingual, migrant-rich and class-stratified peripheral areas of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The analysis centers on how they are situated in these urban peripheries, using written representations of spoken, non-standard Swedish CUV as symbolic resources to give authenticity to the narratives. We examine the distinctive linguistic features that are employed to evoke the imagination of CUV, and how these are used to build the fictional characters and to create certain recognizable social personas and practices. We also discuss the linguistic features that are available but are not exploited to represent the fictional characters’ ways of speaking, and possible reasons why this is so. Finally, we examine how the novels exploit contrasts between registers, particularly between CUV and adult second-language speaker styles and between CUV and standard Swedish, and with what effects. The findings are discussed in the context of the broader social discourses about language, migration, CUV and adult second-language speakers in present-day Sweden.
期刊介绍:
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.