English — Finnish — Swedish — what is it?!

|

And another great example of English for symbolic purposes — and then some — by this Swedish band called Panik Disco.

In this online news article (see below), the band’s lead singer, a Swedish woman, explains that Finnish just “sounds good” in this context, and she wanted to use the language she knows from her Finnish mother.

http://ylex.yle.fi/uutiset/popuutiset/ruotsalaisbandi-kayttaa-suomea-biisillaan-suomi-on-loistava-bilekieli

If you make it through the video, you’ll also notice that the singing style incorporates features of African American Vernacular English as a means of expressing an urban sensibility. Gotta love these examples of making English local, global, expressing and creating an identity, and so much more — all at the same time. After all, it’s just a language. After all, it’s LANGUAGE.

(Thanks to Malin Löfström for sharing this great example with me. Tack!)

 

English for whom?

|

A picture is worth a thousand words, and this picture from downtown Helsinki speaks volumes about the symbolic use of English in Finland

photo(4)

You know what I absolutely love about this window signage in downtown Helsinki (on Kalevankatu, for anyone who really likes the specifics)? I love that it’s in English, but it’s not written for an English-speaking or an international audience, it’s written for Finns — or least for non-Finns who have lived in Finland long enough that they know what narikka means. That’s right, you’re reading along in English — “here is the bar” … OK. Their opening hours. OK, got it … wait a minute: NARIKKA?! What does that mean? And suddenly you know that this is actually an insider’s place. Narikka is one of those classic Finnish words that can’t really be translated — well, it can, be not very neatly or nicely, which is why it’s better to just use the Finnish word, which is what the business owners have opted for here.

This is a narikka:
narikassa

What it means is that you have to pay to check your coat at the door. Usually it’s a fee of something like 2 to 5 euros, and it’s mandatory. It’s part of the Finnish pub tradition, you could say.

But the times are changing, and so is narikka, which apparently is a selling point for this establishment, which is so modern that not only does it use ENGLISH on its window messages, but it doesn’t have a narikka. I love it.

Pliis and kiitos! It’s finally out!

|

Things move slowly in academia. We first started working on this research project in the summer of 2011. Now, finally, almost exactly three years later, we have a publication out! Many thanks to the assistants and especially to the native speakers of Finnish who participated in the study — all 417 of them!

https://www.academia.edu/7659433/Kiitos_and_pliis_the_relationship_of_native_and_borrowed_politeness_markers_in_Finnish

Panel on language contact at IPRA 2015

|

Contact me if you are interested in participating! Abstract deadline is 15 October 2014. The conference is 26-31 July 2015 in Antwerp, Belgium.

Here is the panel proposal:
Linguistic and pragmatic outcomes of contact with English as foreign language

Much of the work on language contact and change has dealt with populations that came to simultaneously share the same environs – due to migration, exploitation, conquest, or other forms of human mobility. Although contact with a non-native language is not unprecedented (note the lexification in certain domains of English from Latin and Greek, for example), the widespread use of English as a lingua franca and foreign language creates ample opportunities for contact with other languages in the current era. In this panel we focus on the widely-reported influence of English. We do not specifically discuss other languages, though the same approach could well be adapted to other languages in future research.

Given its status, it is hardly surprising that English would serve as a lexifier in certain domains: international trade, diplomacy, tourism and travelling, media, information technology, and academia, to name a few. A robust collection of work attests to the incorporation of English terminology within these domains in many of the world’s languages (Hoffman 2011; see also Leppänen and Nikula 2007).

What remains less vigorously studied is the incorporation of non-native elements that are not domain specific. These elements include, for example, in Finnish discourse the use of about as a preposition and the use of jees ‘yes’ as an adjective. Other examples of languages incorporating English elements include expletives, discourse markers such as like and anyway, or politeness particles such as please. An interesting point about many of these features is the pragmatic function they carry and how this is carried over into the receiving language.

With this panel, we propose to investigate more fully the dynamics of language contact with English, a non-native language widely used around the world. In doing so, a particular aim is to focus on non-domain specific elements, especially those that contribute to the pragmatic and social order of a language. This could mean exploring data from any native context and from any variety of sources, including on-line, spoken, or metalingustic data. We also explore theoretical questions concerning contact with English, including transmission of and motivation for borrowing, social meanings, indexicality, and possible grammatical influence.

Out with a bang

|

I was meant to be in Tallinn yesterday, but due to an official document snafoo, I was here in Helsinki.
Which, as it turns out, wasn’t such a bad place to be. Because I was here, anyway, I opted to go to Professor Markku Henriksson’s retirement lecture, and I am so happy I was there.
There were many high points to Professor Henriksson’s hour-long lecture. It was well thought out, illustrated, and it was presented with flair. He emphasized how much he loves his job — and the packed auditorium, full of international scholars as well as local ones — were evidence of that love. The take-home message, though, was a sad one. The metaphor he used throughout his speech was a corn flower, or in other words, one of these:

purple_coneflower_large

The culmination was to quote the surrender speech of Chief Joseph, who was a leader of the Nez Perce people of North America:

“I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

 

(Chief Joseph surrender speech, from October 5, 1877; see http://www.inthebeginning.com/articles/joseph.htm)

This is when I started crying — I blamed it on allergies — but it was his speech, I admit it. I admit it only because I later found out that others in the audience had the same reaction, so I have to ‘fess up.

Professor Henriksson’s point was that, despite all of international contacts, awards, accolades, influence, mentoring, attention (etc., etc., etc.) his 40 years of service have garnered, his efforts and program have not gained support or recognition from his home university or the Ministry of Education here in Finland. This was a terrifying and saddening truth, and one that, considering I work in the same university, really struck me. At the age of 64, Henriksson could put in another four years before mandatory retirement, but he is exhausted from trying to a fight a battle he will never win.

Perhaps the saddest point is that, despite his courage to speak out, there were scant university officials there to hear his words. That, in and of itself, only drives his point home further.

Thanks to the the Maple Leaf and Eagle organizers for a wonderful event. I met new friends and caught up with old ones. Thanks to Professor Henriksson, too, for creating this wonderful community and atmosphere. I sure hope this won’t be the last of it all.

“Material heritage” and other new concepts

|

Today at the opening plenary at the 15th annual Maple Leaf and Eagle conference, hosted by the University of Helsinki, I learned for the first time about this fascinating project, headed by Dr. Laura Peers: http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts/
Although Dr. Peers is a historian who works with physical objects rather than language, there were plenty of terms and ideas from her work that I could apply to my own work on disenfranchised populations. Here are a few examples:
*history/museums tend to be the articulations of “dominant societies”
*there is a need for “alternative” histories
*she talked about “oppositional histories”
*she said that museums in places like Britain, where she works, tend to have “cultural amnesia” about the artifacts they hold and the histories behind them
*the notion of “re-membering,” vs just remembering; in other words, the process of re-experiencing the past and becoming invested in it (I think she attributed this idea to Boas)
*she said that artifacts like the Blackfoot shirts she was talking about are elements of cultural survival; the people who made them put “what they knew into the objects they made.”
Although Dr. Peers is in a completely different field than me, her presentation was very tangible and relevant.

Scandinavians in 19th century Utah

|

1928BDAY

“…one may hear the various changes in Danish from North Jutland to Copenhagen, and listen to Norwegian as spoken in Christiania, Trondhjem and in the mixed-German Bergen, also to the worst Skane or southern Swedish, and to the best as spoken in Goteborg and Stockholm, or hear the different varieties of Swedish from Upsala to Ystad, and yet not hear anything quite like the mixture which is called Danish, Norwegian and Swedish in Utah.”
(Edward Anderson, 1890, cited in William Mulder, Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia, University of Minnesota Press, 1957)

If this quotation is accurate, imagine what mix of Scandinavian languages would have existed in the late 1800s in certain settlements in Utah, a newly settled part of the United States. There were some 26,000 Scandinavia who came to Utah between 1849 and 1930, making it the first major influx to the U.S. (predating the Midwest and other locations by a few years). Was there any other region in the United States that had such a mix of Scandinavians in one location? What kind of koineization or accommodation would have occurred in their languages? What kind of dialect features came with the settlers and stayed? What a fascinating language contact situation, and how little we know about it.