Förortssvenska i grindvakters öron: Perceptioner av migrationsrelaterad språklig variation bortom inlärarspråk och förortsslang

In Sweden, over the few past decades, a large amount of research has been conducted on new urban youth styles, here called suburban slang. More recently, some researchers have begun to focus on the way young individuals from multilingual suburbs speak in more formal situations, here called suburban Swedish – i.e. Swedish close to standard but with a suburban touch, due to, in particular, phonological features indexing suburb. Among the general public, these two ways of speaking are often lumped together under popular labels such as immigrant Swedish or Rinkeby Swedish. As a result, widespread negative attitudes towards the well-known suburban slang risk “rubbing off” on suburban Swedish. This may cause serious problems for the speakers, e.g. if this occurs in a job interview. This danger of negative evaluation was investigated in a folk-linguistic listener study on gatekeeper perceptions. Ten speech stimuli from young adult speakers (among which two samples each of suburban Swedish and suburban slang) were evaluated by 95 gatekeepers (employment officers, student counselors and teachers). A range of data types was analyzed: attitude scales, variety labeling, assessments of the speakers’ occupational level and linguistic background, as well as group discussion data. Results show, among other things, that suburban-sounding speech (slang as well as suburban Swedish) correlates highly with gatekeepers’ low ratings of the speakers’ occupational level. Moreover, the participating gatekeepers lack adequate terminology to differentiate between these two ways of speaking. This implies that sociolinguistic awareness raising should receive more critical attention within the educational sector, including the training for various professions in the public and private sector.