The Sociolinguistics of Urbanization: The Case of the Nordic Countries [Reprint 2010 ed.] 9783110852622, 9783110111842

Table of contents :
Preface
Introduction
Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings
Internal Migration, Biography Formation and Linguistic Change
Linguistic Variation and Composite Life Modes
From the Valley to the City: Language Modification and Language Attitudes
On the Interlinkage of Sociolinguistic Background Variables
The Pronoun minä ‘I’ in Urban Sweden Finnish
Bidialectalism and Identity
The Finnish Language in Helsinki
Urbanization and Language Shift
Bibliography
Contributors

Citation preview

The Sociolinguistics of Urbanization: The Case of the Nordic Countries

Soziolinguistik und Sprachkontakt Sociolinguistics and Language Contact

Herausgegeben von / Edited by Norbert Dittmar

Band 7 / Volume 7

w DE

G Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 1994

The Sociolinguistics of Urbanization: The Case of the Nordic Countries Edited by Bengt Nordberg

w DE

G Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 1994

© Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier, das die US-ANSI-Norm über Haltbarkeit erfüllt. Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

The sociolinguistics of urbanization: the case of the Nordic countries / ed. by Bengt Nordberg. — Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1994 (Sociolinguistics and language contact ; Vol. 7) ISBN 3-11-011184-5 NE: Nordberg, Bengt [Hrsg.]; Soziolinguistik und Sprachkontakt

© Copyright 1994 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschüt2t. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany Satz und Druck: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin Buchbinderische Verarbeitung: Lüderitz & Bauer-GmbH, Berlin

Preface The papers collected in this volume are a product of the joint Nordic research programme Urbanisation and Linguistic Change in Fenno-Scandinavia. This programme, which I had the pleasure to coordinate, involved researchers in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It was launched in the early years of the 1980s, when a growing interest in the linguistic consequences of migration and urbanization was felt in the four countries. The aim of the programme was to cover various aspects of the question of language and urbanization, building on empirical data from the Nordic countries. In most of the constituent projects the focus was on linguistic form — primarily phonology and morphology — but attention was also paid to variation in communicative patterns and the social setting of language. Both urban and rural areas were studied, as well as populations and areas that have passed from rural to urban status. A further objective of the programme was as far as possible to integrate or at least draw on, theories and findings in social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, social psychology and human geography, and one or more social scientists with a relevant research orientation took part in all the working conferences within the programme. The linguistic behaviour and attitudes described and discussed in this volume are always seen as an aspect of social action, socially determined, in a social context. Although the various constituent projects were allowed to operate relatively independently, they were intended to do so in such a way as to guarantee mutual comparability. Although, because of uneven funding, the different projects started at different times and progressed at a varying rate, the researchers engaged in the programme maintained close contact with each other and met regularly at annual working conferences. The fieldwork and most of the transcription and analysis were carried out in the early and mid-1980s. During the latter half of that decade no less than six PhD theses were completed within the programme (and one will be published in early 1994), together with numerous articles and papers. The present volume is an attempt to present some pertinent issues and some of the more important findings to an international readership.

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Preface

The contents of the book were outlined at a meeting in Kristiansand, Norway, in May 1986. During the following year draft versions of the chapters were circulated and discussed among the authors and due account was taken of the comments and criticisms received. Five of the contributions existed in virtually their final versions by the spring of 1988, but unfortunately, heavy workloads and other urgent claims on the time of the authors meant that the remaining chapters could not be completed until 1992 — 93. All contributors were, however, given the opportunity to revise and update earlier versions during 1992. The final editing was then done in the spring and early summer of 1993. We acknowledge with gratitude the financial support given to the research reported in this volume by the following agencies: the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, the Danish Research Council for the Humanities, the Academy of Finland, the Nordic Joint Committee of the Research Councils for the Humanities, and the Nordic Council. I am grateful to Martin Naylor and Donald MacQueen for their very professional translation and revision of the final versions of the manuscripts. I received extremely valuable assistance in the concluding stages of the editing process from Suzanne Ahlstav, Karin Forsberg and Olle Hammermo at the Unit for Advanced Studies in Modern Swedish at Uppsala University. I thank all of them. Uppsala, August 1993

Bengt Nordberg

Contents Preface BENGT NORDBERG Introduction ANNA MALMBERG & BENGT NORDBERG Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

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ROGER ANDERSSON & MATS THELANDER Internal Migration, Biography Formation and Linguistic Change . . 51 INGE LISE PEDERSEN Linguistic Variation and Composite Life Modes

87

HELGE OMDAL From the Valley to the City: Language Modification and Language Attitudes 116 PIRKKO NUOLIJÄRVI On the Interlinkage of Sociolinguistic Background Variables

149

JARMO LAINIO & ERLING WÄNDE The Pronoun minä T in Urban Sweden Finnish

171

ANN-MARIE IVARS Bidialectalism and Identity

203

HEIKKI PAUNONEN The Finnish Language in Helsinki

223

VÜi

Contents

MARIKA TANDEFELT Urbanization and Language Shift

246

Bibliography

274

Contributors

290

BENGT NORDBERG Introduction

To say that urbanization is one of the more radical societal changes of the last two and a half centuries of European history is little short of a platitude. Nevertheless, its impact on most aspects of human life, among them the linguistic, is such as to motivate continuous scrutiny and repeated investigation by researchers working in the large number of disciplines concerned. Although, of course, in the strict meaning of the word, urbanization began at the time the first towns were founded — in central and northern Europe, in the Middle Ages — the modern concept of urbanization has its origin in the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The course of its subsequent development is highly dependent on and interwoven with the growth of industrialism, a monetary economy, systems of public transport etc. At the same time, advances in high-technology communications, physical as well as media-borne, have facilitated considerable geographical mobility among the population, one of the prerequisites of urbanization. Urbanization is a complex concept, referring not only to the physical migration and concentration of a previously decentralized rural population into towns and cities (as the popular notion of urbanization would have it). What has been considered the principal cause of urbanization and the most important single factor in it is the change in economic and occupational structure from a predominantly agrarian economy to an economy heavily reliant on manufacturing industries and service trades. It also brings a concomitant specialization and compartmentalization of occupational life. The shift in economic structure gives rise to a change not only in the organization of work, but also in the social organization of everyday life, in habits, ways of living, opinions and values. Urbanization thus has demographic, economic, social and ethnographic dimensions. Although all of these affect language, it is obvious that the last two aspects are of the greatest consequence for linguistics. Considering the great significance of urbanization for modern social life, especially during the present century, it is somewhat surprising that

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this phenomenon has not received more attention from sociolinguists over the years than it has. It is true that the numerous studies of urban dialects testify to the considerable importance of the consequences of urbanization — and would not have been possible without it — but the process itself and its linguistic ramifications have largely been neglected. Sociolinguistic research in the Labovian tradition has mostly been preoccupied with linguistic variation in socially diversified but geographically stable and mostly native populations, within economically and culturally well-established communities. Although one of its main concerns has been to describe and explain ongoing linguistic change, it has not very often studied the conflict of linguistic norms experienced by internal migrants or by people living in a community undergoing urbanization. In view of the fact that well over 50% of the populations of towns and cities are non-native, in the age group 30 — 50 often as many as 70% (for Sweden and Norway, see Andersson 1979, Omdal 1988), it seems quite a serious sin of omission not to examine the linguistic situation of migrants. Of course, students of the sociolinguistic structure of urbanized areas have not been unaware of the greater linguistic diversity which the language of migrants adds to the picture, and this problem has often been touched upon, although more or less in passing. To explain the occurrence of one trait or another in the urban dialect that happens to be under investigation, reference is frequently made to the existence of the corresponding feature in one or several of the rural dialects in the areas from which migration is known to have taken place. But in-depth studies of the process of linguistic integration of urban migrants, in both behavioural and attitudinal terms, are rare, as are detailed investigations of the linguistic variation of communities undergoing a structural change from a rural to an urban economy. Authors who have examined language and urbanization as a problem in its own right have focused on a few particular aspects. Urbanization is known to promote or increase multilingualism, especially in developing countries where people with a wide variety of native languages flock together in the rapidly growing towns and are forced to learn to switch between different codes in order to handle their everyday affairs. (See for example Parkin 1971; Polome 1971, 1982; Abd-el-Jawad 1986; Mukherjee 1989.) Apart from shorter papers studying various sociolinguistic aspects of the relationship between urban and rural dialects and the role of migrants in the linguistic history of urban communities, there are very few fullscale reports focusing on the process of urbanization of rural speakers. Apart from the dissertations that came out of the research programme underlying the chapters of this volume (and which are listed in the

Introduction

3

bibliography), the work by Bortoni-Ricardo (1985) on the speech of rural migrants to a satellite town of Brasilia and that of Mashlum (1986) on the linguistic modification of the speech of migrants to Oslo, Norway, from a rural district about 150 km north of the capital are two of the very few studies that give a comprehensive account of the linguistic behaviour and attitudes of migrants, making use of the whole apparatus of variation analysis. These two case studies concern migration to large or medium-sized, long-established urban communities. Another type of work deals with the settlement of formerly unpopulated areas by people from different parts of the country, who thus create a new speech community — a new town or a fairly densely populated rural community — without a native vernacular. The task of the researcher is then to uncover the sociolinguistic patterns and social forces moulding the new local dialect — if indeed such a dialect emerges. The pioneer study in this genre is Van de Yen's (1969) investigation in Noordoostpolder, an area which was settled by people from rural districts all over the Netherlands. Similar conditions are treated by Mashlum (1992) in her survey of the dialectal socialization of children and adolescents in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. However, families do not usually stay at this northerly latitude for more than about ten years, so the demographic and linguistic situation is extremely fluid. A third variant of linguistic development of a newly settled area is represented by the British town of Milton Keynes, founded around 1970, which is currently the subject of a research project on dialect contact in a new town (see e.g. Kerswill forthc.). Finally, Gal's (1979) description of the language shift (from Hungarian to German) occurring in the small Austrian town of Oberwart as the linguistic consequence of a change from a rural economy (agriculture) to an urban one (industrial and commercial work), mediated by a change in attitudes, may be cited as an example of research where the focus is predominantly on the structure of the community rather than on a particular group of migrant speakers. The cause of the language shift is sought in the new way of life brought about by the change in economic conditions. Several factors on the urban sociolinguistic scene conspire to complicate an analysis of the linguistic behaviour of townspeople as compared to that of more rural speakers, especially when the sample of informants is not limited to speakers native to the town in question. First of all, the set of possible speech situations is greatly augmented and more diversified than in rural settings, as a consequence of the multifarious and specialized occupational, institutional and leisure activities that an urban milieu offers.

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People are usually members of more numerous, larger but less dense social networks than in the countryside, and meet and talk to a large number of individuals with diverse social and linguistic backgrounds. Urbanization involves intensified and more varied language and dialect contacts, a situation which exposes the individual language user to a larger number of interchangeable linguistic forms, each with its own specific, locally and individually determined, symbolic value. In a linguistically composite milieu, where several varieties exist side by side, the capacity of speech forms to serve as markers of social identity becomes highly significant and the speakers' awareness of this function of language may be assumed to be sharpened as compared to a more isolated and/or stable speech community. Questions of social, cultural and linguistic identity and integration take on even greater importance in a framework that includes the linguistic and social life histories of mobile individuals in a demographically, economically and socially changing society. The choice of a linguistic form (alternating varieties or individual symbolically loaded variants) that a speaker makes cannot be fully explained without reference to a more complex set of conditioning factors and inducements: individual, personal and ideological factors, cultural values and life modes, special occupational requirements, perceptions of self and of social reality and of one's own position in the latter. These are at least as important and explanatorily powerful as the more traditional quantitative macrosociological variables of socioeconomic class, age, sex, education, occupation etc. As far as migrants are concerned, details in their migration history such as the cause of migration, age at migration, integration in and attitudes towards both emigration and immigration community must be taken into account. In such a situation the symbolic values associated with existing speech forms become more complex and acquire more shades of meaning, a state of affairs that calls for openness, caution and flexibility in interpreting the acts of identification which linguistic utterances imply. The linguistic processes and consequences of urbanization are, as was mentioned earlier, highly complex. Urban environments are sites of both language and dialect contact and cultural contact. The last-mentioned will affect the interactional and discourse strategies of the different speaker groups coming into contact with each other, but we will now turn instead to the effects of urbanization on the linguistic behaviour of newly urbanized speakers and on the linguistic structure of the varieties they speak. One possible development on the part of the speaker, which is also borne out by some of the following chapters, is the rise of bilingualism and bidialectalism. As far as contact between two languages is concerned,

Introduction

5

a more or less advanced form of bilingualism including diverse kinds of interference phenomena is the most expected outcome in first- and secondgeneration immigrants. Depending on the intensity of contact with the country of origin and its culture and on the density of the immigrant network in the new place of residence, the effects on the structure of the first language vary from lexical loans via stylistic reductions to simplification of parts of the grammatical structure. An almost inevitable effect of the minority situation in which most (urbanized) immigrants find themselves is the functional reduction and domain restrictions to which their first language is subjected. Sometimes such a reduction in usability befalls a native, resident population. Such a situation, related to urbanization in a bilingual country, is when a community or an area inhabited by speakers of language A becomes the destination of massive internal migration, predominantly by speakers of language B, so that the former majority situation is reversed. This is exactly what happened in the Finnish capital area after Helsinki became the centre of power in Finland and following the subsequent urbanization of what is now a metropolitan area. In the present volume, the chapters by Paunonen and Tandefelt deal with certain aspects of this process. A decrease in the usability of the home dialect is something which the (urbanized) migrant from another part of the common language area also experiences. Socializing with fellow migrants from the same area of origin and talking to the folks back home over the phone or during holiday visits to one's place of birth are about the only opportunities for using one's original dialect in an unadulterated form and without inhibition. For the most part, internal migrants go around trying to accommodate to one or several of the varieties spoken in their new place of residence. The effects on the resulting linguistic structure have been marshalled and summarized with commendable discernment by Peter Trudgill (1986, esp. ch. 3), in the concepts of levelling, simplification and re-allocation. Levelling refers to the discarding of the most divergent, marked dialect forms (in one's original dialect as well as in that of the new place of residence) in favour of more widely used, less salient variants. Simplification is simply 'the increase in morphophonemic regularity' (op. cit. p. 103). In Trudgill's model levelling and simplification are subsumed under the concept of koinei^ation. Re-allocation, finally, refers to a situation where original dialect forms have not been eliminated but have acquired new functions, for example as stylistic variants or as symbols of some ideological, social or political group. All three of these processes are exemplified in the following, notably in the chapters by Pedersen, Omdal, Nuolijärvi and Ivars.

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This admittedly very short sketch of some of the linguistic issues raised by urbanization may, if nothing else, at least convey the insight that a closer study of the relationship between urbanization and language change is a worthwhile undertaking. But why the Nordic countries? The idea of collecting a number of studies on language and urbanization from this area may at first sight seem fortuitous or, at best, far-fetched. But there are good reasons for such a project. In many respects the area under investigation forms a coherent cultural, economic, political and linguistic community. The four countries represented in this volume have a long common history, being linked to each other over the centuries in varying constellations of political unions. Despite current — and recent — membership of different economic and political alliances, the cultural and economic integration of the Nordic countries is far-reaching, with a common labour market, common institutions and agencies for cultural cooperation, a considerable volume of intra-Nordic tourism, and a high degree of shared values in terms of ideology and way of life. The interaction and interdependence of the Nordic countries in most arenas of modern life is significantly livelier and closer than the corresponding links with non-Nordic countries. Linguistically, the Nordic countries present an interesting picture, with a fair degree of mutual comprehensibility between the three central Scandinavian languages: Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. In addition, there is a secondary linguistic community including the geographically more peripheral Finnish, Icelandic and Faeroese populations who use one of the central Scandinavian languages as their lingua franca for communicating with other people of the Nordic region. Of greater interest for the present problem, perhaps, are the dissimilarities in the countries' sociolinguistic profiles, in terms of the number of official languages and their mutual relationships, the distribution and degree of multilingualism, the degree of dialectal diversity, the relationship between dialects and standard, and the social status of the different speech varieties. In fact, it could be argued that Denmark, Norway and Sweden, as speech communities, show clearly different degrees of focusing, to use the terminology of Le Page & Tabouret-Keller (1985). Despite an earlier state of roughly comparable dialect divergence in the three countries, it is obvious that today Denmark is linguistically the most focused of these speech communities, owing to the long tradition of political and administrative centralization and the dominance of the Copenhagen area. Norway, on the other hand, stands out as the least focused with its two standardized varieties, bokmal and nynorsk, and a large number of regional and local varieties, not only

Introduction

7

accepted but encouraged to be used in public. As is often the case, Sweden falls somewhere in between. The linguistic situation in Finland is in many respects different from that of the other Nordic countries. This is not only because of its status as an officially bilingual country with constant skirmishes between language policy activists on both sides and the problems of the steadily decreasing Swedish-speaking minority in urbanized parts of the Swedish settlement areas. In addition, in Finland the standard written language has held a very strong position and a very normative attitude has predominated both in schools and in other sectors of public life. This is true of both national languages, but more especially of Finnish 'book language', whose function as a national symbol from the middle of the 19th century onwards has been more pronounced than its equivalent in the other countries. A spoken standard has only recently begun to develop, coinciding in time with the comparatively late wave of urbanization and migration from the northern and eastern parts of Finland to the Helsinki metropolitan area and the counties of the south-west. So within the Nordic region, with its relatively far-reaching social and economic integration, its close cultural affinity and even a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, we find sociolinguistic differences which must reasonably be assumed to have some impact on the course of linguistic urbanization and its results and which amply justify a study of these circumstances. The fact that a large proportion of the rural dialects of the four countries are very well documented, supplying the student of language and urbanization with useful and easily accessible background material, is another argument in favour of such research. The considerable degree of similarity in terms of economics, geography, culture and ideology prepares the ground for modern innovations and trends to follow similar courses of development in the Nordic countries. In general, this is also true of the urbanization process. Compared with other parts of Europe, urbanization was late in the Nordic countries and is, on the whole, a feature of the late 19th and the 20th century. In a macro-historical perspective, urbanization thus coincides more clearly with other features of modernization, e.g. advances in high-technology communications and high geographical mobility. This means inter alia that the urbanization process was still in full swing during the post-World War II period and could be successfully studied during the 1980s with access to then still fairly recent urban migrants. This is a further argument for conducting studies of this kind at this particular time.

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Bengt Nordberg

There are, however, differences in the urbanization process, both chronologically and structurally, between the four countries. For a considerable period of time Copenhagen was virtually the only Scandinavian city that bore any resemblance to a metropolis. Generally speaking Sweden and Denmark were also somewhat ahead of Norway, and Finland was the last of the countries to undergo large-scale urbanization, the peak period there coming as late as the 1960s —1970s. There are a number of structural differences between the countries that may be mentioned. In Sweden more than in other countries, industrialization took place in rural areas, giving rise to quite a large number of small urban-like communities, bruksorter, while the expansion of many older towns was based more on commerce and administration. In Norway, too, there have been concerted efforts, often government-subsidized, to locate big new industries in formerly almost completely rural communities. Ärdal and H0yanger are examples of new industrial towns that have experienced rapid growth and a total economic restructuring with radical linguistic consequences during the 20th century. And finally, one salient feature of Finland's economic development, due to that country's comparatively late urbanization, is a disproportionately large number of individuals moving directly from small-scale farming into service occupations. In so doing, they bypass the intermediate stage of blue-collar industrial worker which is otherwise common in socioeconomic development. This is one of several indications of the overall heat and intensity of Finnish social, economic and cultural development during the post-war period. This situation, with basic cultural, ethnic and ideological similarities on the one hand and distinctive national characteristics on the other, presents an interesting opportunity to study the interrelationship of urbanization and language change. The present volume contains nine studies from a joint research programme focusing on the impact of urbanization on language structure, language use and language attitudes in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the four largest Nordic countries with a total population of about 23 million people. This impact of urbanization on language is manifested at several levels: phonological, grammatical and lexical structure (both in the form of gradual change and dialect shift); language shift; language attitudes; pragmatics and communicative patterns. All these aspects are covered by the studies, although the majority focus on phonological and morphological variation. Furthermore, most of the chapters deal with the language of migrants both within and between the respective countries, but two of them study the linguistic situation of a native resident population in areas

Introduction

9

that have passed from rural to urban status. The linguistic changes studied are principally of three different kinds: change from one variety to another within one and the same language (e.g. from dialect to standard) in connection with internal migration, language shift (from Swedish to Finnish) as a result of urbanization within one country, and changes within one language in connection with migration between countries (the Swedish of Swedish-speaking migrants from Finland to Sweden and the Finnish of Finnish-speaking migrants from Finland to Sweden). The empirical data are obtained from investigations at different places in the four countries. The towns and regions concerned are shown on the general map (map 1 see p. 10). All the papers are based on empirical data, but they are, to varying degrees, theoretically oriented. They link the linguistic data to sociogeographical, sociopsychological and cultural factors. The first two contributions attempt to place language and language change caused by urbanization in a wider perspective. Malmberg & Nordberg's paper is intended as a kind of ethnographic background to the other chapters and deals with an assumed disparity between urban and rural settings regarding the socioecological conditions of language (i. e. the linguistic situations in which individuals participate in their everyday lives). The empirical material consists of self-reports in the form of linguistic diaries. The study is based on the social and cultural circumstances which create different speech situations and linguistic needs in the two types of setting. Malmberg & Nordberg hypothesize that these factors may give rise to different pragmatic norms determining both the functional distribution of local and standardized varieties and the communicative competence of urban and rural language users. After a short survey of salient features of urbanization in the Swedish context, Andersson & Thelander relate linguistic changes in an internal migrant group in Sweden to social and psychological adjustment in new contexts. The study focuses on the different social and linguistic strategies that migrants develop to cope with a new life situation in order to maintain biographical continuity. Changes in the language and language use of migrants are analysed in the light of sociogeographical studies of individual variations in socioterritorial anchoring, continuity and local assimilation. The authors also address the question of migrant selection and hypothesize a relationship, at the level of the individual, between migration propensity and adjustment to standard language norms. The complexity of the concept of urbanization and the linguistic reflection of that complexity is clearly brought out in the Danish contribution

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Areas with native Swedish-ipoaking population in Finland

Map 1: General map of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden indicating the sites and regions of investigation

by Inge Lise Pedersen. The setting for her study is a small township which has shifted over the last few decades from an exclusively agrarian society to a more suburban structure incorporating several small towns. This form of urbanization creates different types of social networks characterized by dissimilar life modes and different ideologies. Especially interesting is a

Introduction

11

group of young adults with a combination of decisively urban social traits (such as wage-earning, separation of home and workplace, etc.) and rural ideology and customs. This combination is reflected in speech by the high number of single instances of different dialect features (often only one or two words in a word group included in the variable) which are used, more or less deliberately, by these young adults as markers of a dialectal and rural identity. These dialect forms have, in Trudgill's terminology, been functionally re-allocated. This state of affairs is paralleled by the incongruity between measurable language behaviour, which indicates continuous linguistic variation, and the speakers' subjective interpretation of the situation as a linguistic dichotomy between dialect and regional standard. Although there are but small objective social differences, one could to a certain extent speak of two social networks, each with its own cultural norm and life mode, existing side by side. A significant aspect of the concept of life mode is ideology and attitudes. In the Norwegian contribution by Omdal, which deals with the linguistic relationship between rural migrants from the neighbouring area and natives of the city of Kristiansand in southern Norway, the focus is more explicitly on the sociolinguistic attitudes of the migrants. The attitudes investigated concern general views on dialect shift in connection with migration, conceptions of identity and ways of speaking, and judgements about the two specific speech varieties in question: the rural native dialect and the urban dialect in the place of immigration. A point to be made here is that the linguistic systems involved are quite dissimilar. These attitudes are correlated with the degree of actual dialect change evidenced in the speech of the informants. One explanation of the varying degree of harmony between attitudes and behaviour is the complexity and difficulty of the linguistic phenomena to be mastered. A desirable equilibrium between attitudes and behaviour is seldom attained. Norway offers an especially interesting arena for a comparison between actual usage and attitudes towards different dialects, since present mainstream ideology attaches great value to rural dialects. The Finnish sociolinguistic scene is currently very animated, compressing in time a social and linguistic development that has occupied a much larger stretch of time in other societies. In this state of flux it has become increasingly apparent that traditional sociolinguistic methods using group data, treating social background variables separately, and working with concepts like homogeneous sociolects and social groups do not yield satisfactory explanations. Instead we have to trace heterogeneous linguistic behaviour back to specific combinations or interlinkages of external back-

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ground variables and also to take into account factors like the status and prestige of the dialect communities involved, occupational linguistic demands and contacts, social networks and individual ideology. There is a need for qualitative, individual data reflecting a large spectrum of factors in a sample of life histories, rather than quantitative group data. This is convincingly demonstrated in the contribution by Nuolijärvi, in which she analyses the linguistic strategies of two internal migrant groups in Helsinki. The four remaining papers reflect the historical ties between Sweden and Finland and the Swedish and Finnish languages. Finnish citizens with Swedish or Finnish as their native language are becoming urbanized in Sweden (as well as in Finland) as a result of the common labour market. Likewise, the changing economic and social structure of the old Swedishspeaking area in southern Finland, with an increasing merger of the two language groups, is of great consequence for the gradual loss of the minority language and for language shift on the part of the individual. Competition between the two languages in Helsinki began when this originally very humble town in the middle of a Swedish-speaking area, with no immediate and natural contact with any Finnish dialect, was made the capital of Finland in 1812. It was in Helsinki, too, that the Finnish national standard was formed by idealistic and nationalistic academics with little anchorage in a genuine spoken variety, a circumstance that has had lasting consequences in terms of impeding the emergence of an educated spoken variety of Finnish. The gap between the prescriptive written norm and the vernaculars has been unusually wide and it seems as if the real nature of modern spoken Finnish has not been very well known or not recognized. According to Lainio & Wände this has had consequences for our understanding of the degree of syntheticity and analyticity of Finnish and of possible tendencies towards greater analyticity. They investigate this problem as manifested in the different variants of the Finnish counterpart to am' (minä (stressed) ölen, ölen but also mä ole(n), the last-mentioned not permitted by the standard norm), and they do this among Finnish immigrants in Sweden. Their initial hypothesis is that a separate Finnish spoken standard — deviating from that existing in Finland — is developing among Finnish immigrants in urban centres in Sweden. Such a development could be attributed both to demographic circumstances — there is in Sweden a higher proportion of migrants from the northern and eastern parts of Finland than there is in the south of Finland — and to the influence of the Swedish language itself.

Introduction

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This hypothesis is not confirmed. Certainly language use differs from the written norm, but so too do urban dialects of Finnish in Finland. Lainio & Wände arrive at the rather surprising finding that urbanized Sweden Finns neither display archaic dialect forms to any greater extent than dialect speakers in Finland, nor are they more 'advanced' typologically than urban speakers in southern Finland generally. They ascribe this to the fact that their informants are first-generation Finns in Sweden who still maintain fairly frequent contact with their home country. Lainio & Wände underline the importance of clause prosody in processes of linguistic change and formulate the following conclusion: 'when a feature is on its way out it occurs more frequently in an unstressed position, when it is on its way into a system it also occurs first in unstressed position.' The site of the study of the Finnish-speaking immigrant group, Eskilstuna, is also the new home of a Swedish dialect-speaking group from rural Ostrobothnia (Pohjanmaa) in Finland. It is assumed that the linguistic strategies of these immigrants in their new environment will differ from those of in-migrants from other parts of Sweden, owing to the greater linguistic distance between the varieties concerned and the fact that their migration has involved crossing a national border. Compared to longdistance internal migrants from the Swedish province of West Bothnia (Västerbotten) to Eskilstuna, who provide the empirical material for Andersson & Thelander's study, these Finland-Swedes become bidialectal to a much larger extent, preserving their native dialect at the same time as they acquire a more or less standard central Swedish variety. In the contribution by Ivars, variations in the degree of bidialectalism among the immigrants are demonstrated and correlated with social and psychological variables. The last two chapters take a macro approach to language change in connection with urbanization, covering time spans of 100 —200 years. Both Paunonen and Tandefelt deal with the historical development of Swedish and Finnish in the Helsinki region, but Paunonen concentrates on the growth of Finnish and Tandefelt on the recession of Swedish. Paunonen's paper gives a fascinating picture of a rather unique situation: the majority language was virtually non-existent in the new capital and as migrants from more or less distant Finnish-speaking areas collected, there was for a long time no local variety to accommodate to, only the puristic 'book language' of the academics. The proponents of pure Finnish had to wage war both against speakers of Swedish and against speakers of Finnish dialects; they were more successful on the former sector of the front than the latter. Paunonen traces the different elements in the variety that is now

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gaining ground: colloquial Helsinki speech, different dialects, 'book language' and Swedish loans. This emerging colloquial variety is described by Paunonen as 'anti-normative' and is on the increase not only in Helsinki but in many urban dialects, and may eventually attain the status of general spoken Finnish. In the literature on language shift, urbanization, in and of itself, has often been seen as a key factor in promoting this linguistic process (see above p. 2 f.). This view is questioned in the study by Tandefelt, who draws attention to the intricate interplay of many different factors in the specific Finnish situation with an autochthonous minority which has roots in both urban and rural areas. Her study is concerned with five generations of a family living in a community close to Helsinki. During the last century the area has developed from a completely agrarian hinterland of the capital to a highly urbanized suburban area. Over the same period the officially Swedish-speaking population has gone down dramatically in percentage terms (from approx. 77% to 5%). However, it has remained about the same or even increased a little in absolute numbers. This attenuation has made it increasingly difficult to maintain Swedish networks and public services in the minority language. Tandefelt demonstrates how demographic, economic and social changes, brought about by political decisions on a macro-level, affect the citizens' scope for language choice. She also demonstrates the way in which these macro-level changes interact with micro-level factors such as personal attitudes, ideology, feasibility of practical everyday actions involving language use, family dominance patterns etc. In the same way as the mental and cultural urbanization process in the case of migrants is not completed within one generation (see Andersson & Thelander's article), language shift and language loss are a process which takes two or more generations to complete and involves an intermediate stage of bilingualism. There is a clear theoretical affinity between the contributions of Tandefelt, Nuolijärvi and Pedersen in particular. All three adopt a holistic perspective on the individual language users' life histories, views of life and modes of living, stressing the ideological component in language use. However, this tendency is discernible in the other chapters as well. And this, I would say, is the main lesson to be learnt from the study of language use in the highly composite setting that an urban speech milieu provides. More mentalistic approaches have to be tried and the personal background variables investigated should include factors such as the speaker's selfperception and self-esteem, his or her cultural and ethnic identity, the migration history and geographical anchoring of the speaker, the nature

Introduction

15

of his or her work and kind of work tasks etc. The majority of the studies reported here used methods of collection that captured data such as these. Instead of, or in addition to, sociological 'hard' data we need ethnological and psychological 'soft' data and detailed biographical information. The intricacies and complexities of linguistic behaviour in urbanized communities also call for a combination of many explanatory variables and make earlier analytical models using sociological categories such as socioeconomic group, age, sex, income and occupation as their only parameters seem simplistic. If this volume can help to encourage an approach to sociolinguistic research in which the whole individual and his or her life situation is taken into account in order to explain linguistic behaviour, it will have served its purpose.

ANNA MALMBERG & BENGT NORDBERG Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings 1. Introduction One of the theoretical cornerstones of sociolinguistics, indeed the axiomatic hub around which the whole discipline revolves, is that language use and social structure are mutually dependent. This means, for example, that social stratification and social mobility are reflected in and reinforced by sociolects and changes in the relationships between them. It also means that the degree of centralization in society and concentration of economic power is mirrored by the relative strength of the standard (or official) language and regional or social varieties (or non-official languages). But that is not all. If linguistic performance is regarded as a form of social behaviour, then the societal framework in which language is used or, to put it another way, the social situations which society makes available as possible or appropriate for linguistic communication, will of course be of decisive significance. The communicative competence of individuals is highly situation-dependent, their linguistic ability having been developed by practice in the speech situations in which, as social beings, they are naturally involved in their daily lives. At the same time, the ability or inability of particular individuals to cooperate linguistically in concrete situations influences the broader society and creates, maintains or changes social structures at various levels. Two people who, on one or more occasions, have managed to engage in meaningful and constructive conversation and have arrived at shared meanings, develop or strengthen a common group identity or at any rate favourable perceptions of each other's group. At the same time, they begin to become familiar with and skilled at acting in the situation concerned. According to this view, conversations which are unsuccessful in one respect or another naturally have the opposite effect. Depending on the economic and occupational structure, patterns of social networks, culturally determined rules of interaction etc., the set of situations with which individuals have to cope in communicative terms varies from one setting to another. This is of course

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

17

most apparent when we compare the communication patterns of clearly distinct cultures, but differing demands as regards language use could conceivably be identified when we examine different subcultures within a Western society as well. According to the classical theory of urbanization, compared with the traditional rural way of life urbanization entails the creation of a new subculture. The process is more than simply the geographical relocation and concentration of population into large towns. It also involves of course — and this is probably the primary cause of the urbanization of the last one hundred and thirty years or so — a radical transformation of economic activities and occupational structure, affecting both the nature and the content of employment. Key elements in this process are specialization and technicalization, a far-reaching division of occupational functions, and the creation of new sectors. Agriculture and forestry, once the main sources of income, have had to make way first for industry and later for services and public administration (Hägerstrand 1970). Other facets of the modernization of society coincide and interact with urbanization, including far-reaching bureaucratization of public and social institutions, the institutionalization of large areas of private and social life, and the growing use of advanced technology in both physical and media-based communications. In view of the last-mentioned factor, the more recent development of society can be said to contain a paradox. While the population is now concentrated in fewer but more densely built-up residential areas, people have become far more mobile, covering large areas both in their work and in their hours of leisure. It is no longer unusual to commute large distances to work, up to 200 km on a daily basis and almost unlimited distances in the case of weekly commuters. At the same time, people can remain in continuous contact with one another with the help of car phones, two-way radios, faxes, computer networks etc. Consequently, the urbanization process has also brought about changes in people's life patterns. Cultural geographers, ethnologists and sociologists, such as Wirth (1971), Daun (1974), Thunberg et al. (1979) and Andersson (1982, 1987) talk about the emergence of a special urban way of life or life mode. Specialization and subdivision are not confined to working life; the entire life of the individual has become compartmentalized, with relatively strict dividing lines between work, family life and leisure. Gainful employment is not the only area to be closely regulated; much of people's leisure time is also far more highly organized than before. Any given individual is dependent on a larger number of other persons performing separate functions, and is forced to switch between numerous

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different social (and for that matter communicative) roles in his or her everyday life. In other words, the network of contacts associated with the urban way of life is large and loosely knit. Many of the important concerns and decisions of everyday life (buying, selling, agreements, conditions of employment, social security, health care, education etc.), once handled largely informally through private contacts with people generally known to you, have been institutionalized and formalized, now being dealt with by the officials and officers of public authorities, organizations and companies, and in many cases involving a good deal of written communication. An important motive for establishing new contacts can be said to be the extent to which they are beneficial to the individual's survival, and the individual person thus tends to be replaced by categories (Wirth 1971:165). Individuals are replaceable by their functional equivalents, since their most important function is in fact their function in a wider context. Many of a person's relationships tend to be secondary (i. e. impersonal, superficial and transitory). It has also been argued that interaction with relatives and with immediate neighbours has declined in urban living. Into the later decades of the 20th century, at least, there have of course been urban environments that have been notable exceptions to the main pattern described here, working-class districts with very close social networks, of the kind described by Lesley Milroy (1980) and which also existed in Nordic cities, for example. It could be imagined that these circumstances would influence language use and the demands placed on people's linguistic competence in a variety of ways. First of all, growing urban communities bring together individuals with differing geographical and to some extent — if we confine ourselves to internal migration — cultural backgrounds. They bring with them not only dialects that differ in terms of their linguistic structure, but also different culturally conditioned rules of speaking and what Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz call 'contextualization conventions', i. e. the means by which interlocutors signal their perception of what it is they are actually involved in, what expectations and intentions they have, and how they interpret their own and their interlocutors' behaviour (1982:17 — 18). Secondly, far-reaching specialization of occupations, activities and institutions means that specific varieties of language use, or 'activity languages', arise which can differ appreciably from each other, chiefly in terms of vocabulary, phraseology, textual strategies and rules of interaction. There emerge, as it were, several registers within the language. At the same time, the considerable division of labour creates a great need for cooperation, mediated by linguistic communication, both between repre-

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

19

sentatives of different sectors and types of activity and between the individual citizen and a host of organizations and authorities. To assert themselves on the labour market, to safeguard their interests and uphold their rights, individuals increasingly need to be able to state their case and convey their views to an often impersonal authority or a group of strangers, and to do so on the formal conditions that have evolved for the particular type of interaction concerned. Any given individual will thus be forced to communicate with people with a different geographical, cultural and sometimes ethnic background, or with people with training in certain verbal activities alien to the individual in question. These changes that are assumed to occur in ecological conditions might be expected to have repercussions at several linguistic levels, both structural and interactional. Traditionally, urbanization has been associated with structural changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon which, in Sweden and elsewhere, have broadly speaking resulted in a levelling of once very distinct dialects or their replacement with regional standards. This has been ascribed partly to the mixture of dialects that arises in migration centres and partly to the greater overall geographical mobility of the population, over and above their moving to towns. However, other explanations are also conceivable. It is well known that — at least in Sweden in the 20th century — almost all dialect speakers have been bidialectal, i. e. have had a command of a more standard-like variety alongside their dialect, and that the two speech varieties have each had a relatively well-defined domain. The most important factors conditioning this situational switching have turned out to be listener, social role and, to some extent, topic. The more fully integrated in the local network and the better acquainted speakers are, the greater is the likelihood of their using dialect. Situations that are felt to be private favour the use of dialect, while the standard language is reserved for more public situations. (See for instance Blom & Gumperz 1972, Dahlstedt & Teleman 1974, Thelander 1979a, Hultgren 1983 and 1986.) People speak one way in situations where they are conversing with individuals close to them about matters and individuals they are familiar with and identify with, and a different way in situations where they feel some distance to the individuals and matters concerned. If the description given earlier of the diversified, bureaucratized and institutionalized urban community is correct, the proportion of speech situations in which dialect is considered to have a place or even to be the only socially acceptable variety will be much smaller in this setting than in its opposite. The situational prerequisites for using the special variety

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associated with private conversation would appear to be greatly restricted. (Cf. also Thelander 1982:46 f.) The communicative situation of urbanized society also has other consequences for language use, however. An ability to interact with people with whom one is not personally acquainted or whose background is unfamiliar becomes essential. People's background experience shapes their expectations as to the content and the course of social events, it guides their actual behaviour and their interpretation of the meanings and intentions behind the behaviour of their interlocutors. Individuals with the same cultural and social background can fall back on their common experience when they are talking together, and do not need to make intentions, meanings, references and relationships explicit to the same extent as interactants who do not share such background knowledge. It may be expected to be far more often the case in urban society than in rural that shared background knowledge cannot be taken for granted and that people therefore have to express themselves in explicit verbal terms. This presumably results in a larger amount of metacommunication, e.g. prior announcement of speech acts or explanatory comments on utterances, or in the use of longer and more complex referential expressions. Since — still hypothetically — individuals living in an urbanized society are relatively often brought face to face with people with different socioculturally determined conversational styles or with a variety of occupationally based discourse strategies, greater communicative flexibility is required of them, in terms of both production and perception. The ability to assume someone else's role in order to perceive correctly the finer shades of meaning in an utterance, or deftly to adjust one's own utterances to the background of one's interlocutor, is put to a harder test in the urban setting than in the rural. It may be suspected that communicative misunderstandings are commoner in such a heterogeneous environment. The higher degree of institutionalization (and bureaucratization) in the handling of people's everyday affairs which is to be found in postindustrial, urbanized society, and the greater need for explicit communication, probably mean that formal types of interaction are commoner in cities than in the country. The speech situations in which such interaction occurs are also of a kind that tends not to favour the use of local dialect. In informal or familiar situations, what a person says is more personally coloured, more a manifestation of feelings and passing moods, a reflection of events of the moment and of relationships with the persons present. The language used in such situations has been called intimate language (närspräk), while that occurring in the first type of situation has been called language of

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

21

distance (fjärrspräk) (Teleman 1979), terms which we will use in our subsequent discussion. These two registers differ both in terms of their linguistic structure (intimate language gravitates towards local dialect, language of distance towards the standard variety) and as regards the relationship between utterances and the extralinguistic reality to which they refer (language of distance is characterized by verbal completeness and explicitness, intimate language by more fragmentary, implicit modes of expression, the meaning being clarified by prosodic, paralinguistic and non-verbal means, and by a reliance on shared prior knowledge). When referring to intimate language and language of distance, we will be thinking equally of these two aspects. Our main concern in this chapter is not to analyse utterances or conversations, but to identify the situations in which people interact linguistically and to see whether these situations involve factors that favour or counteract one variety or the other. (Cf. Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz (1982:10): 'The initial task in the analysis is basically an ethnographic one of collecting actual instances of interactive situations.') Our study will largely be a matter of finding answers to Fishman's classic question: 'Who speaks to whom where, when and about what?' (e.g. Fishman 1972a). Such a study of the speech situations existing in a rural and an urban setting may be expected to shed some light on the external socioecological causes of the gradual disappearance of traditional dialects and of changes in people's communicative strategies. If our aim is to discover to what extent the linguistic environment has changed historically as a result of urbanization, an area representing a more urban phase in terms of its demographic and economic structure should be compared with one representing a more rural phase. Since we cannot step back a hundred years in time and therefore cannot carry out a longitudinal study of rural and urban settings, we must make do with present-day situations. An area of a town will then have to represent a more urban and a country area a more rural environment. In so far as one can regard these urban and rural areas as representing different phases in the development of society, it is also possible to form an opinion as to whether the linguistic environment has changed over time, both at the macro-level of society and for individuals, as a result of their moving from country to town or because of economic restructuring of their places of residence. As regards both these aspects, it is important to bear in mind that the difference between town and country essentially derives from their clearly distinct occupational structures, which in socioeconomic terms are reflected in an uneven distribution of social groups between the two

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environments. In a macro-perspective, the normal progression for migrants is from farm and forest work in the country, via employment in manufacturing industry, to service occupations in towns. Differences in socioeconomic structure are, as it were, built into the urban —rural dichotomy. Another fact that cannot be ignored is that both town and countryside are involved in the process of urbanization. (See for example Andersson & Thelander this volume.) Sparsely settled areas have also been affected by urbanization, both in the sense that their populations have declined, which has of course changed the living conditions not only of those who have left, but also for those who remain, and in the sense that the modernization of working life has also affected employment in these rural areas. And yet there can be little doubt that the process has affected different areas to differing degrees. The settlement and employment patterns of the country areas of today are, after all, still more closely akin to rural conditions in the past than are the corresponding urban structures. It is a matter of differences of degree, but these differences are probably clear enough for it to be possible and meaningful, nevertheless, to draw conclusions from our synchronic comparison about a diachronic process.

2. Data and methods 2.1 Areas studied

One area representing a more urban setting and one representing a more rural environment were selected. To be representative, these areas needed to exhibit structural features that would be perceived as typical of an urban or rural community. The principle applied in choosing them was that the urban area should have a similar demographic and economic profile to Sweden's ten largest towns and that the rural area should display the corresponding similarities to sparsely settled areas1 of Sweden generally. Two parishes in Uppsala were chosen by these criteria to represent the more urban area. Uppsala, which is Sweden's fourth largest city, has an employment structure characterized by a relatively large proportion of employees in the public administration and service sector and a relatively 1

The term 'sparsely settled' is used here to refer to an area not containing a concentration of population with more than 200 inhabitants and in which the distance between buildings is normally greater than 200 metres, this being the normal geographical definition of 'sparsely settled' used in Sweden (Sveriges officiella Statistik: Folk- och bostadsrakningen 1975 [Official Statistics of Sweden: Population and Housing Census 1975]).

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

23

low proportion in traditional manufacturing industry. The commonest occupational categories according to Statistics Sweden's classification are work in science, technology and social sciences, financial and office work, manufacturing and services. This structure is representative of the way employment has evolved in Sweden's largest towns over the past 20 years. At the same time, Uppsala is one of the country's fastest-growing cities, with an extremely high degree of mobility and a rapidly expanding, research-dependent, high-technology business sector. Two parishes in a rural municipality in Hälsingland, in the southern part of Norrland (see general map, p. 10), were chosen to represent the more rural area. These parishes, where a high proportion of those gainfully employed work in agriculture and forestry and in manufacturing, have an employment structure closely resembling that of sparsely populated parts of Sweden generally. Services and public administration are of course represented, too, but on a considerably smaller scale than in Uppsala. 2.2 Methods

The principal method used to collect data for this study was to ask a number of informants to report their own linguistic activity in diary form. Briefly, we asked various categories of individuals to keep a diary of the communication situations they found themselves in on two days, a weekday and a Saturday or Sunday, or to be more precise a working day and a non-working day.2 For each of the communication situations informants were involved in, we asked them to supply the following information: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Time (in hours and minutes) Place Type of activity: writing, reading, listening, conversing Subject-matter of the communication event, in broad terms Other simultaneous activity Relationship to interlocutor: a) degree of acquaintance: know well, know quite well, know slightly or don't know; b) role relationship: e.g. relative, neighbour, colleague, boss, official; uniplex or multiplex role relationship (7) Channel: face-to-face or mediated interaction (e.g. telephone) 2

Several informants had other days off work than Saturday and Sunday, or else their days off varied.

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The particulars provided in these diaries tell us, hopefully, about the actual, rather than the possible, language use of each individual. However, it could perhaps be assumed — with all due caution — that the sum-total of the information provided by the informants about their language use might give us some idea of the possibilities and requirements existing in the two settings. Using this method one can never be absolutely certain of obtaining reliable data on actual language use. The thoroughness with which the informants set about keeping their diaries varied quite considerably, despite their all having received the same instructions. The varying quality of the data obtained is an obvious drawback with the diary method, but it is hardly surprising. It is natural for certain informants to be more interested than others in a project of this kind. We have not found any systematic social bias in this regard, however. An equally significant advantage of the method, as we see it, is that it allows informants themselves to structure their language use — lessons are learned, for example, about what they regard as relevant situational boundaries, what they consider they are communicating about, or how they perceive their relationship to the people they are communicating with. In our opinion, in these regards informants' own reports provide a truer, ethnographically more correct picture of everyday language use than we as outside researchers would be able to elicit by imposing a classification of our own. The diary entries were supplemented with personal interviews with a limited number of informants in their homes. Interviewees had the opportunity to provide further details about each of the situations recorded in their diaries, and were also asked general questions about their everyday linguistic situation. 23 Selection of informants

Diary informants were selected on the basis of a random sample taken from the respective parishes' population registers, which are sorted by civil registration number. A total of 60 individuals from each area (30 from each parish) took part in the study, making 120 informants in all. (Since each of these people kept a diary for two days, the material collected comprises a total of 240 diaries.) Half the informants are women and half men, all of them in the economically active age of 30 — 50. In addition, just under half the informants (59) belong to the socioeconomic class of manual workers and just over half (61) to the category of non-manual employees. The overall socioeconomic distribution is even, therefore, but there is a considerable difference between the two areas studied. Of the

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

25

urban informants, 14 are manual workers and 46 non-manual, while the reverse situation applies in the rural area: 45 manual versus 15 non-manual employees. The category of non-manual employees includes certain lowerpaid white-collar workers who do not differ appreciably in terms of education from manual workers. (For details, see Malmberg 1984a.) The population consists of Swedish citizens living in the parishes concerned. Only individuals who could be reached by telephone were included in the study, so as to facilitate the collection of data. (Very few potential informants were excluded by this requirement, however, since virtually all households have a telephone.) Our data could thus also be used to shed light on social and gender differences in language use, but in this chapter we will focus on the rural —urban comparison. Interviews were conducted with 20 of the diary informants, of whom 10 were women and 10 men, 10 manual and 10 non-manual workers, 10 rural and 10 urban residents. These 20 do not constitute a random sample, but do represent a cross-section of different occupations.

3. Analytical model The change in life mode that is assumed to have accompanied the change in societal structure may, then, be taken also to have entailed a change in the distribution of the different types of linguistic situations in which individuals become involved in their day-to-day lives. The task we are faced with is thus to study how individuals move in communicative space, i. e. the set of possible linguistic situations which society offers. Our first step, therefore, will be to determine, with the question of the prerequisites for using intimate language or language of distance as our point of departure, what this 'situation potential' is. The terms intimate language and language of distance, as we have defined them (see above, p. 20 f.), refer primarily to spoken language, and the nature of the conversational environment will therefore be of most importance in this context. For one thing, conversations account for the lion's share of all communication and, for another, it is active use of language which may be assumed to have the primary influence on an individual's linguistic repertoire. Linguistic activities that are used in one-way communication (writing, reading, listening) are naturally not irrelevant, but in this connection their significance can be regarded as secondary. In our analysis of the linguistic environment, therefore, we have attached most weight to the types of conversational situations people find themselves in. In this chapter, apart

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from a few brief remarks, only the conversational environment will be commented on. 3.1 Conversational situation A person's conversational environment could be defined as the sum of the conversational situations he or she encounters in everyday life. Of the numerous components held to constitute a speech situation (see for example the well-known model of Hymes (1972:58 — 65)), there are three which recur, with certain variations, in most studies and are said to strongly condition the form of linguistic expression used, and which, moreover, we have direct access to with the method used. They are, first, where you are, second, your relationship to the person(s) you are talking to and, third, what you are talking about. (See, among others, Blom & Gumperz 1972, Fishman 1972a, Halliday 1978, Brown & Fräser 1979.) The three main components of the conversational situation which we take into account are thus: (1) Place (2) Relationship between the participants (3) Topic The picture which these three constituents together provide ought to be able to tell us a good deal about the conversational situation as a whole. At this stage we have not included the purpose of the conversation, even though all the evidence is that this largely determines the shape which interaction assumes. Our data do not allow us to read off directly the varying aims behind the speakers' actions, and it is indeed a delicate and difficult task for informants to state these aims. A situational analysis that included purpose would require an entirely different type of data and method. (See section 3.1.3 below, however.) The subcategories into which these three factors are broken down in our analysis are of necessity fairly crude. This is chiefly because the diary method as such implies a broad, general view of the linguistic environment as a whole, but also because, as was noted earlier, the quality of the data varies. Fairly broad categories must be employed if all the material collected is to be used. The drawback with this rough-and-ready taxonomy is that some information will be lost where diary entries are in fact more detailed. But there are advantages, too. With the categories chosen, we can obtain a more general picture of the conversational environments of all the informants, rather than a more detailed picture of that of just a few informants. They also enable us to work with an analytical model that is

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reasonably easy to handle. What is more, the categories used are lent some support by the information obtained during the interviews. Below we shall look a little more closely at how the three factors place, relationship and topic have been subcategorized. 3.1.1 Place

The places where conversations occur have been divided into private and public. The characteristic feature of a public place is that it is not possible, in the way it is in a private place, to choose the people you meet. In a public place, you cannot simply turn someone away, and you may be observed by people you are unable to control in the same way as in a private place. Only in a private place can you speak entirely freely, and only there is it possible to control your surroundings in the sense of keeping an eye on and to some extent directing them. Examples of private places are the home, the garden, the front yard, other people's homes, your own or someone else's car. Public places include streets and squares, country roads, places of work (outside the home), shops and other service outlets, meeting halls and public transport. Workplaces have in a sense an intermediate status. Many gainfully employed people have the privilege of being able to act in a fairly casual manner in their own office or other work premises. Nevertheless, we have chosen to regard places of work as public in this dichotomy. 3.1.2 Relationship between participants

The concept of relationship can be assigned at least two meanings in this context. It can refer on the one hand to the degree of acquaintance between the interactants, i. e. how well they know each other. Relationship can also refer to the mutual social roles of the interactants — the role relationship that exists between them. Familiar examples are child — parent, husband — wife, consumer —salesperson, doctor —patient, boss —subordinate, colleagues, neighbours etc. Both these aspects have a decisive bearing on the linguistic shape which a conversation assumes. Henceforth, therefore, the 'relationship' concept will be broken down into the two components degree of acquaintance and role relationship. The importance of the latter in the subsequent analysis will be dealt with in more detail in 3.1.3, but first a few words about degree of acquaintance. In their diaries, informants were asked to state the extent to which they were acquainted with their interlocutors on a four-point scale, i. e. whether they knew them 'well, quite well, slightly or not at all'. For some of our analyses we have subsequently reduced these four degrees of acquaintance

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to the dichotomy known—unknown, where known covers 'know well' and 'know quite well' and unknown refers to 'know slightly' and 'don't know at all'. This categorization springs from the interview responses, which suggest that this is in fact the most relevant grouping of different degrees of acquaintance. Several informants admittedly make a distinction between 'know well' and 'know quite well' (e.g. one says: 'If you're together a lot you know each other well or quite well, but you know what makes the other one tick if you know each other well'), but the biggest difference is felt to be between 'know well' and 'know quite well', on the one hand, and 'know slightly' and 'don't know at all' on the other. Most of those interviewed are of the opinion that if people know one another well or quite well, they can talk to each other about most things. If this is the case, the 'known — unknown' dichotomy must be highly relevant and as serviceable as a classification into four categories. 3.1.3

Topic

In addition to place and relationship, the subject-matter or topic of a conversation is a factor determining the shape of the linguistic activity involved. Topic is a notoriously difficult entity to demarcate, the prime difficulty lying in deciding what level of abstraction to employ. A topic analysis will produce different results depending on whether we content ourselves with broad subject areas such as music, history, sport or cooking, move down to subdivisions such as classical music, jazz, pop, different periods of history etc., or focus on lower and lower subject levels such as instrumental music, symphonic music, romantic symphonies, the symphonies of a particular 19th-century composer, a specific symphony by that composer, a particular performance of it, and so on. Naturally it is impossible to instruct linguistic laymen to report topics at a particular level of abstraction, and therefore here, too, we left it to informants themselves to demarcate the subjects they talked about. The instructions they were given asked them to note, for each conversational situation, among other things 'what you talked about (in as much detail as possible — people often talk about a lot of different things when they meet; try to describe all the topics of conversation in broad outline)'. As examples, the instructions mentioned 'discussion about a specific task at work; chatting about the staff party'. What is more, since one of the aims of this study is to examine possible changes in the conversational environment as a background to changes in communication patterns and linguistic structure, it is less interesting to identify a range of topics as such than to study the function of topic in the

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conversational situation as a whole. First, it has to be decided to what domain the topic belongs. Of significance here is what is achieved by a topic of conversation, what the purpose of raising a particular subject is. Human social activities are often divided into two spheres or domains — public, or societal, and private, or individual. In the societal sphere, people act as professionals or citizens, as producers or consumers, as experts or clients. Within this sphere, transactions involving goods and services are conducted, and the individual functions as a link in the activities of society. Topics which concern these areas can be said to belong to the professional domain. In such circumstances, interaction is case- and goal-oriented, and often has a specific purpose. In the individual sphere, on the other hand, people act as individuals in their own right. They represent only themselves and their closest family, and the focus is on their health, personality and emotions. Hobbies and leisure activities also fall within this sphere. Topics relating to these areas can be said to belong to the private domain, and interaction need not have a particularly explicit aim "or purpose, often having a purely social or phatic function. What we are ultimately seeking to do is define something that could be called the interaction type of a given conversational situation, a factor that greatly influences the participants' verbal and interactional behaviour, their conversational style and their choice of intimate language or language of distance. A categorization in terms of domains and interaction types is dependent not only on the topic or topics, but also on the role relationship between the participants in a specific situation (see Halliday 1973, 1978). In fact, to be able to group into domains the topics which informants recorded — often in fairly vague or ambiguous terms — and to deduce interaction types from these domains, we have collated reported topics with the information supplied about role relations (see examples below). The conversational situations described in the informants' diaries most frequently involve topics within one domain only — private or professional. Sometimes, though, topics from both domains are raised within what the informants perceive to be one and the same conversational situation. For example, a customer and a counter clerk in a post office may move from talking about the postal business in hand to chatting about the weather or mutual acquaintances. In our analysis of the informants' diary entries, therefore, we have used three categories, namely Private domain Professional domain Private -f Professional domain

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The third category refers to situations where, within a single conversational situation, informants reported two or more topics belonging to different domains. Corresponding to the two domains there are two interaction types, which we have called personal and transactional. Here, too, we allow for a mixed category. Domains and interaction types correspond as follows: Domain

Interaction type

Private Professional Private + Professional (P + P)

Personal Transactional Personal+Transactional (P+T)

The table below gives a few examples of how, on the basis of informants' reports of topic and interlocutor, we have arrived at the domain and interaction type of different situations.

0)

Informant's occupation

Interlocutor

Insurance clerk

Colleague Colleague Colleague

(2) Insurance clerk (3) Insurance clerk (4) Insurance clerk (5) Insurance clerk (6) Insurance clerk (7) District visitor

Topic reported by informant

'my illness' 'fire claims' 'my illness and car claim' Colleague 'my stay in hospital' Office clerk 'days sick-listed while in hospital' Hospital 'my illness" doctor Client 'client's personal problems' Friend 'personal problems'

(deaconess) (8) District visitor (deaconess) (9) Weather observer Colleague (10) Weather observer Children

'weather' 'nasty weather'

Domain

Interaction type

Private Professional P+P

Personal Transactional P+T

Private Professional

Personal Transactional

Professional

Transactional

Professional

Transactional

Private

Personal

Professional Private

Transactional Personal

Of the above examples, we regard examples (1) —(3) as fairly easy to categorize. In (1) it is the informant's illness as a private problem, rather than as an insurance matter, that is being discussed with a colleague during a break at work. (2), on the other hand, is in all probability concerned with a matter falling within the professional domain (note the indefinite plural form fire claims and the choice of words), and in (3) the private illness is discussed alongside the subject 'car claim', which is undoubtedly something the insurance clerk is dealing with on a professional basis and

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

31

now discussing with her colleague. Superficially, the topics in examples (4) and (5) could be regarded as equivalent. Nevertheless, we have taken them to imply different interaction types, the reason being that we interpret the topic in (4) as a general personal account of how the informant felt about her stay in hospital. This is something altogether different from the topic in example (5), which we interpret as information supplied to the office clerk about how many days the informant was in hospital, i. e. a detail relevant to the social insurance paperwork surrounding an employee's absence due to sickness. Note also the different words used to refer to the interlocutors, colleague and office clerk. Examples (4) and (5) thus represent different domains and different interaction types. In (6) the informant is acting as a patient in an institutional consultation with an expert within a public institution. The interaction type here is thus regarded as transactional. In examples (7) and (8) we have a similar situation — 'personal problems' are discussed in both cases, but in (7) the informant is acting in her professional capacity while in (8) she is acting as a private individual. Examples (9) and (10) are variations on the same theme. In (9) the informant assumes her professional role, in (10) she is acting as a private individual. The last four examples especially show how important the role relationship is in determining the type of interaction involved. 3.2 Conversational environment

The individual factors of place, relationship — with its subheadings of degree of acquaintance and role relationship — and topic can only be isolated from one another at a theoretical level. In reality, only the combination of all three is possible. Within this integral whole, the three factors probably cannot be regarded as mutually independent. Their interdependence is reflected, not least, in the well-known fact that you cannot talk about anything you like with anyone you like, or about anything you like absolutely anywhere you like. In our analysis, however, we have broken down this whole and proceeded from the four fundamental factors place, degree of acquaintance, role relationship and topic, which can then be combined into various composite concepts reflecting individual aspects of conversational situations, in the first instance, and ultimately of the overall conversational environment. The analysis has been carried out stepwise, as illustrated below:

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Anna Malmberg & Bengt Nordberg

Place

-_

framework

Degree of ___--acquaintance Role relationship ,_ ^

.

---

^\ Conversational ^X situation

T τ>. . Interaction Domain -

As the diagram indicates, in the initial stages of our analysis, interaction type is kept apart from place and degree of acquaintance, which form an entity of their own, a kind of framework for the conversation. As components of the conversational situation, the values of these framework variables are given from the outset and do not change within the situation. Should they change, a new situation arises. They are in other words static and stable. By contrast, the topic of a conversation, as we have seen, can be changed during what is felt to be one and the same situation, and individuals who are in a multiplex role relationship to one another, e.g. neighbours and doctor — patient, may 'activate' several of their role relations during a given conversation. The framework is the unchanging backdrop against which the varying linguistic and interactional behaviour of the participants is enacted. By combining the different values of the two factors involved, we arrive at four different types of conversational framework, as follows:

Degree of acquaintance

Place private public 1 3 2 4

known unknown

Within each of these four frameworks, interaction of the personal type, the transactional .type, or both the personal and the transactional type (P-f-T) is possible. Framework coupled with interaction type gives us a picture of the entire conversational situation. The possible conversational situations thus obtained are as follows:

Interaction type

Personal Transactional P+ T

1 A B C

Framework 2 3 D G E H F I

4 J K L

Situations A — L can be said to constitute the situation potential which society offers with regard to conversations. By studying how individuals

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33

move within this potential, what situations occur, and in what proportions the different situations occur, we can obtain a picture of the conversational environments of town and country and draw conclusions about the scope for using intimate language or language of distance in the two areas. There should be a good basis for using intimate language if interaction occurs in a private place with known individuals within a close-knit network, in a symmetrical role relationship, and if it is of the personal type. A conversational environment consisting of such situations could be regarded as informal. The opposite conditions should prevail if there is to be a good chance of language of distance being used, i. e. interaction should occur in a public place with unknown or little known individuals within a loosely knit network, in an asymmetric role relationship, and it should be of the transactional type. Such a conversational environment could be considered formal.

4. The conversational environments of town and country — results and comments How, then, do people living in urban and rural areas 'choose' to communicate within the communicative potential outlined above, or, to put it another way, what do individuals' conversational environments look like in towns and in the countryside? The total time spent in conversation by individuals in the two areas of our study during the two days reported does not differ very much. In the urban area, people devoted an average of 42% of total time to conversation. The corresponding figure for the rural area is 38%.3 'Total time' means the time for which the informants were asked to keep a diary, i. e. between 6 a.m. and midnight on two days (i. e. 1,080 χ 2 = 2,160 minutes). On average, the two groups of informants thus spend some 7 h 30 min and 6 h 50 min, respectively, in conversation out of a day of 18 waking hours, which must be said to be a fairly high figure. Here, 'time spent in conversation' means the time informants recorded that they were involved in conversational situations. All this time was thus not necessarily filled with speech, but it was the time during which the informants felt they were in a conversational situation in which speech was possible. (How active participants actually are in such situations 3

To these figures, we can add the time spent on other linguistic activities, i. e. writing, reading and listening. In the town, 29% of the total time covered by informants' diaries is devoted to such activities, in the country, 21%.

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is impossible to gauge with the method used, but on the other hand such detailed knowledge is hardly relevant in this context.) 4,1 Place, degree of acquaintance, interaction type

As we have already noted, there is no major difference in total conversation time between the urban and rural areas, but if we look a little closer at the three constituents of the conversational situation, some differences do emerge.

Urban Rural

Private

Public

62.3 65.8

37.7 34.2

Table 1: Time spent in conversation in private and public places, in the urban and rural areas (% of total conversation time)

Table 1 shows the percentages of the total time spent in conversation during which conversations take place in private and public places in the urban and rural areas.4 As the table indicates, people most often converse in private places in both town and country, although slightly more noticeably so in the country than in the town. It is somewhat surprising that conversations in public places do not take up more than just over a third of total conversation time, bearing in mind that we have counted the workplace as a public place if it is outside the home. The small difference between town and country could possibly be attributed to the simple fact that there are more public places in an urban setting than in a rural environment. What is more, a somewhat larger proportion of rural inhabitants have their place of work in or immediately adjacent to their homes. Table 2 shows the percentages of total conversation time spent in conversation with known and unknown persons5 in the urban and the rural area.

Urban Rural

Known

Unknown

87.2 92.9

12.8 7.1

Table 2: Breakdown of conversation time by degree of acquaintance, in the urban and rural areas (% of total conversation time) 4

5

Unless otherwise stated, the values given here and below are means for the communicative activity of informants on weekdays and weekends. These percentages are intended to give a picture of the informants' 'week-round' linguistic environment. Variation between weekdays and weekends is dealt with in 4.4. As regards the meaning of 'known' and 'unknown', see 3.1.2.

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35

This table shows that the majority of conversation time is spent talking to people the informants know, and that this is even more markedly the case in the rural area than in the urban area. Here, the difference between town and country is somewhat greater than in the case of place. It does not appear to be particularly dramatic, however. Nevertheless, if the 120 individuals are ranked by the percentage of time they spend in conversation with known individuals, the group demarcated by the upper quartile, i. e. the quarter who converse most with people they know, is totally dominated by rural inhabitants (26 of the 30), while in the group falling below the lower quartile townspeople predominate (19 out of 30). The proportion of conversation time spent with 'unknown' people is still strikingly small, however (Malmberg 1984b:22f.). In table 2 we saw the relative amounts of time informants devote to conversation with known and unknown persons. The diary entries, however, also allow us to perform an overall contact network analysis, i. e. to study how many and which people informants meet in the course of an average day. The information on the informants' networks of contacts supplied by the diaries relate both to degree of acquaintance ('know well, know quite well, know slightly, don't know at all') and to some of the role functions which have been assumed to be less frequent in the urban way of life (relative, neighbour, contacts with persons in more than one function). Urban

Rural

a. Degree of acquaintance Average number of persons per day Of whom (%) Know well Know quite well Know slightly Don't know

15 28.5 33.9 19.3 18.3

12 46.0 33.9 13.7 6.4

b. Certain role functions Average number of persons per day Of whom (%) Neighbours Relatives With multiplex role relations

15 6.0 8.6 10.6

12 5.6 11.3 22.6

Table 3: Contact networks in the urban and rural areas

From table 3 we see that the urban informants meet, on average, somewhat more people in their 'week-round' lives than their rural counterparts. This is entirely in keeping with our hypotheses. However, the figures perhaps

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seem low and the difference between the urban and rural setting small. One conceivable reason for both these facts is that, by and large, informants refrained from recording very brief, routine, chance utterances, such as brief comments on what they were doing, with no real addressee, or short greetings or comments on the weather to passers-by. A pilot study, in which diary records were compared with tape recordings made continuously in the course of a day with a portable cassette recorder, suggested that informants did in fact make a systematic selection of this kind. In general, this would be expected to reduce the number of contacts entered in diaries, and to do so more in the town than in the country area. Table 3a indicates that there are fairly appreciable differences between the urban and rural areas as regards degree of acquaintance. The biggest differences here are to be found in the top and bottom categories. In the country, the proportion of people whom informants know well is 17.5 percentage points higher than in the town, and the proportion of people whom they do not know at all is very small compared with the urban informants. Since, according to table 2, the urban—rural disparity is smaller in terms of how conversation time is divided between 'known' and 'unknown' interlocutors than in terms of the number of people informants have contact with, it may be concluded that the difference is primarily attributable to brief contacts. The assumptions which theories of the urban life mode have made about contact with relatives and neighbours cannot be considered to be borne out here (table 3b). First of all, relatives — in the sense of relatives outside the nuclear family — account for a relatively large proportion of all personal contacts (8.6% in the town and 11.3% in the country), and secondly the difference between the two areas is fairly small. An urban trend towards a dissolution of kinship ties cannot be discerned, at least not on the strength of the data in this study. Nor can any appreciable difference as regards contacts with neighbours be detected. We also see from table 3b that the proportion of people who maintain multiplex role relationships with informants (e.g. a person who associates with an informant both as a colleague at work and as a fellow member of the local football club) is just over twice as high in the country as in the town. Here, in other words, our data support the hypotheses concerning the urban way of life. In the urban area, the social network is larger and more loosely knit, i. e. individuals are involved in a larger number of uniplex role relations. In table 4 we see that there are considerable differences between the urban and the rural area when it comes to interaction type. (Interaction

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

37

type here, as was indicated earlier, is the set of conversational conventions — linguistic, stylistic and interactional — implied by the role relationship and topic, which governs the communication that takes place.)

Personal Transactional P+T

Urban

Rural

76.5 18.4 5.1

69.1 13.3 17.6

Table 4: Interaction types in the urban and rural areas (% of total conversation time)

The table indicates that it is considerably commoner in the country than in the town for both the personal and the transactional interaction type to be represented in what is perceived to be one and the same conversational situation. By the same token, there is less purely personal and exclusively transactional interaction in the rural area. This could be taken to mean that town dwellers more often assume only one role at a time than do rural residents. Social life is more compartmentalized in the town than in the country, where there is clearly not as distinct a separation of functions. The network analysis suggested the same thing. An interesting point in this connection is that rural and urban informants seem to have different views of the role of topic in the conversational situation. In the interviews, informants were for example asked: 'In what situations do you speak least/most freely? Is it a particular person or a particular subject that can make a situation more awkward/formal?' One tendency that emerges from the answers is that the rural inhabitants either feel they can speak freely in all conversational situations — 'We're ourselves' — or, if they perceive a difference between situations, they often consider that the person, not the topic, is what makes the situation more formal. Most of the urban interviewees, on the other hand, feel that situations differ and that both individuals and topics can increase the formality of a situation. Among the rural informants, the subject of conversation does not appear to be something that alters situations to any appreciable extent, whereas this seems to be the case among the informants in the town. 4.2 Conversational framework As was explained in section 3.2, the conversational framework is an analytical concept built from the components place and degree of acquaintance. Combined with interaction type, it constitutes the conversational

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situation. Table 5 shows the distribution of conversation time between the different frameworks in the urban and the rural area.

Framework Framework Framework Framework

1 (private— known) 2 (private— unknown) 3 (public — known) 4 (public — unknown)

Urban

Rural

61.4 1.0 25.8 11.9

65.0 1.0 28.1 6.1

Table 5: Conversational frameworks in the urban and rural areas (% of total conversation time)

Table 5 indicates that informants are most often involved in conversational frameworks where the place is private and the interlocutors known to them (framework 1), though to a larger extent in the country than in the town. Such a conversational framework virtually ensures an informal conversational environment. Urban and rural informants alike spend very little time in frameworks in which the place is private and the persons present are strangers (framework 2). (The commonest situation falling within this framework is probably telephone calls. But one does wonder whether the informants never receive strangers in their homes.) In framework 2, then, we find no difference between town and country. Roughly a quarter of total conversation time is spent in frameworks where the place is public and the interlocutors are known (framework 3), this category presumably consisting to a large extent of conversations with colleagues at work. Rural informants, though, converse somewhat more often in framework 3 than their urban counterparts. In the town, the proportion of time spent in conversation with unknown people in public places (framework 4) is almost twice that found in the country. The most marked differences between town and country as regards conversational framework, then, are to be found in the more extreme categories — frameworks 1 and 4. In the country, people talk more often to individuals they know in private places. In the town, people converse more frequently with strangers in public places. This pattern tallies with our original hypothesis. 4.3 Conversational situations Each of the four frameworks can, according to our analytical model, provide a setting for different interaction types: personal (P), transactional (T) or a combination of the two (P + T). In this model, framework coupled to interaction type constitutes the conversational situation as a whole and,

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

39

moreover, the sum of these conversational situations (A —L) constitutes the potential conversational environment within which the individual has to operate. The actual nature of the conversational environment is then dependent on the frequency with which the different situations arise. Table 6 shows the distribution of the different conversational situations within the situation potential. Framework 1 Framework 2 Framework 3 Framework 4 Urban (Sit.) Rural Urban (Sit.) Rural Urban (Sit.) Rural Urban (Sit.) Rural P 60.1 T 0.9 P + T 0.4

Total

61.4

(A) (Β) (C)

61.9 0.9 2.2

0.5 0.4 0.1

65.0

1.0

(D) (E) (F)

0.6 0.3 0.1

14.3 9.3 2.2

1.0

25.8

(G) (H) (I)

6.2 8.4 13.5

1.6 7.9 2.4

28.1

11.9

(J) (K) (L)

0.7 3.7 1.7 6.1

Table 6: The conversational environment of the urban and rural areas as a constellation of conversational situations (% of total conversation time)

The table indicates that the rural —urban difference that has been shown to exist in framework 1 is due to people in the country being involved in personal interaction (situation A) and mixed interaction (situation C) to a somewhat greater extent than people in the town. The total share of conversation time accounted for by framework 2 is so small that hardly any differences can be discerned within that time. As regards framework 3, where only small differences were found to exist overall between the urban and the rural setting, this breakdown reveals two clear differences between the two. They are that, within this framework, urban informants mainly involve themselves in the personal interaction type (situation G), whereas rural informants engage to an appreciably higher degree than their urban counterparts in conversations including both personal and transactional interaction (situation I). The latter must be largely because the professionals whom people in the country come into contact with on a professional basis are also relatives or personal acquaintances, i. e. the interlocutors here are in a multiplex role relationship to one another. The difference demonstrated between town and country in the case of framework 4 stems primarily from the fact that urban residents are involved more often than country dwellers in transactional conversations with unknown persons in public places (situation K). It seems natural to interpret this as a reflection of the greater degree of specialization and compartmentalization in urban life, as a result of which people very often, in the professional domain, have to deal with strangers with whom they have a uniplex role relationship.

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It would seem that the urban —rural difference we found earlier as regards the transactional interaction type in general can primarily be traced to framework 4, i. e. where informants are in a public place talking to persons unknown to them — which can be regarded as the most public framework. Correspondingly, the principal cause of the difference regarding the personal interaction type appears to lie in framework 3. Urban residents seem to interact personally even in public places to a larger extent than people living in the country. The town —country difference found for the combined situation (P + T) can also be attributed to framework 3. In the rural area, a higher proportion of P + T occurs in frameworks 1 and 3 (situations C and I). In the town, the proportion is somewhat higher in framework 4 (situation L). Possibly these last-mentioned situations include some form of politeness routine with the strangers concerned before the main topic — the official or professional matter in hand — is raised. To sum up, the most marked differences between town and country as regards conversational environment are to be found in situations C, G, I and K. The greater tendency among rural informants to mix interaction types within a single situation when talking to people known to them (situations C and I) is very probably due to their coming into contact more with people with whom they have a multiplex role relationship than do urban informants (see table 3b). The high percentage of conversation time falling within these situations reinforces the view that life in the country is not as strictly divided into different functions as it is in the town. One reason why urban people converse more than rural residents with known persons in public places within the personal interaction type (situation G) could perhaps be differing leisure patterns in town and country. There are presumably more opportunities in towns to enjoy oneself in organized ways in what have here been classed as public places. Another reason, already mentioned, may be that urban places of work are more often separate from people's homes and are therefore counted here as public places, and that at work urban employees have more colleagues with whom they have the chance to engage in personal conversation. The urban informants' higher proportion of conversations in situation K — transactional interaction with strangers in a public place — tallies with the assumption that towns exhibit greater compartmentalization and a higher proportion of uniplex role relationships, and that this mainly makes itself felt in the societal sphere. Situation K is probably very common in service occupations, which are a more dominant feature of the urban occupational structure than the rural.

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

41

4.4 Weekdays and weekends

The figures we have presented so far have been mean values for one weekday and a Saturday or Sunday, a form of presentation for which there are several arguments. Despite this generalization, the results suggest in some cases that life in a town may be functionally more compartmentalized than life in the country. It would be interesting, therefore, to look a little closer at possible differences between weekdays and weekends (strictly, working days and days off work) in the urban and rural settings. If there is a considerable difference in communication patterns between nonworking and working days, this will shed new light on the functional subdivision and fragmentation of people's life modes.6 Table 7 shows the differences between weekdays and weekends in the town and in the country as regards place, degree of acquaintance and interaction type.

Place (private) Acquaintance (known) P T P+T

Weekday

Urban Weekend

Diff.

Weekday

Rural Weekend

Diff.

42.3 80.2 58.8 32.9 8.3

81.3 93.3 95.4 . 3.8 0.8

+ 39.0 + 13.1 + 36.6 -29.1 - 7.5

53.9 89.1 56.8 23.3 20.0

81.5 97.0 82.9 3.2 14.0

+ 27.6 + 7.9 + 26.1 -20.1 - 6.0

Table 7: Conversation time in the categories private place, degree of acquaintance 'known', and interaction types Ρ, Τ and P+T, on weekdays and at weekends in the urban and the rural area (% of total conversation time)

As table 7 shows, for all the variables examined, the difference between weekdays and weekends is greater in the town than in the country. This gives us a further indication that there is a more marked separation of functions in urban than in rural life. On the other hand, the differences have the same sign in each case; in both town and country, people spend relatively more time conversing in private places and with individuals known to them at weekends than on weekdays, and the interaction type is more commonly personal and less often transactional or mixed at weekends. The larger differences in the urban area are no doubt due to the larger proportion of the population there whose work is organized in 6

People working in certain occupations do not have a fixed schedule of working and nonworking days. Individuals in this situation were instructed to choose a weekday and a Saturday or Sunday.

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the normal way for manufacturing and service occupations, with a fiveday working week and Saturdays and Sundays off, and also to the fact that more gainfully employed people in the town make a clear distinction between work and leisure. The same tendency is revealed by a comparison between weekdays and weekends of the urban and rural contact networks, with the exception of just one point of comparison, that of multiplex role relationships (see tables 8a and b).

a. Degree of acquaintance Average number of persons per day Of whom % Know well Know quite well Know slightly Don't know b. Certain role functions Average number of persons per day Of whom % Neighbours Relatives With multiplex role relations

Urban Weekday Weekend Diff.

Rural Weekday Weekend

Diff.

23

8

17

- 9

25.6 36.3 20.8 17.2

36.8 22.4 14.5 26.3

23

8

3.6 3.6 10.7

13.2 23.7 10.5

-15

+11.2 45.6 -13.9 32.5 - 6.3 14.2 + 9.1 7.7

8

47.4 37.2 11.5 3.8

-15

17

8

+ 9.6 +20.1 - 0.2

3.0 6.5 21.3

10.2 23.1 24.4

+ 1.8 +4.7 - 2.7 - 3.9

- 9 + 7.2 + 16.6 + 3.1

Table 8: Contact networks in the urban and rural areas on weekdays and at weekends

The differences between weekday and weekend are not just greater for the urban informants than for their rural counterparts; in a couple of cases they even have a different sign. The number of people with whom informants have linguistic contact is smaller at weekends than on weekdays, and the difference in this respect in the countryside is considerable, even though variation between the two types of days is not as great as in the town. There is also a large weekday —weekend difference among rural informants as regards conversations with relatives, but in all other respects weekdays and weekends seem fairly similar in communication terms for these people. The differences noted in both town and country are mostly in the direction that would be expected: people mix more often with relatives and neighbours on days off than on working days, and the

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

43

decrease in the number of personal contacts on non-working days is thus mainly attributable to work-related and similar contacts in the societal sphere. It is interesting that both the number of people informants know well and the number they do not know at all increase in relative terms at weekends in the urban setting. The latter finding seems to suggest a different type of leisure activity in the town than in the country, with more activities of the kind where people are thrown into conversation with strangers, e.g. visits to restaurants or pubs or other types of public entertainment (cf. 4.3 above). To sum up, an examination of how the conversational environment varies over the days of the week supports the assumption that the linguistic environment of towns is more heterogeneous than that of country areas and thus requires a greater degree of linguistic adjustment and flexibility. However, it cannot be claimed that the difference between town and country as regards variation in the conversational environment between the two days studied is solely or even largely attributable to one or other of the days. 4.5 Individual examples

Our account of the urban and rural conversational environments so far has been based on group values, the results presented above being means for informants living in the urban or the rural area. Behind these means, however, there are 120 individuals, and in this section we will shed a little more light on the conversational environment of two of these individuals. Apart from keeping a diary, the two people concerned were also interviewed. One of them lives in a small hamlet consisting of some ten homesteads, the other in central Uppsala. The conversational environments of these two informants can serve as illustrations of what a more rural and a more urban conversational environment may look like. The two people concerned have a good deal in common in terms of their external circumstances. They are both women aged around 45, married with two children in their 20s (one of whom has left home), and they also have the same occupation, that of shop assistant in a food store. By choosing two individuals in otherwise similar circumstances, but living in different environments, we can isolate the difference between rural and urban. On the face of it, these two informants live in fairly similar situations, but on closer inspection we find fundamental differences as regards their way of life. We will begin with the rural informant. We can call her Rura. Rura was born and grew up in the tiny village where she now lives, and the

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only time she has moved was when she married and went to live in another house in the same village. She attended school for seven years, and since the age of 16 has worked as a shop assistant in the village shop. Her husband works in the forest, together with her elder son, with whom she is in daily contact even though he has left home. She also meets her parents, who live in the house next door, every day. Rura has a great deal of contact with other villagers and with people from the surrounding villages. Virtually every day one acquaintance or another calls in at the couple's home and stops for a chat. She never invites anyone; people turn up unannounced. 'They pop in for a cup of coffee.' She knows everyone who lives in the village and in the villages nearby. Rura is the only person employed in the shop. She and her boss both do all the various jobs that need to be done there. 'My boss isn't like a boss — he's like a friend.' She is acquainted with all her customers and knows where they live, their family circumstances and what work they do. She often meets customers privately as well. It is extremely rare for someone she does not know to come in to shop. 'You get the same people coming in every week. You get to know all of them — they're like one big family.' Often the customers who come in sit down for a cup of coffee in the shop, and talk about all kinds of things. 'Most people who come in chat about other things as well as their shopping. You do that when you know each other. We talk about private matters, too.' Since she has a regular clientele, she knows what they all want, and sometimes has to remind them of something they have forgotten to buy. It really seems as if Rura has a personal relationship to her customers. 'If a particular customer doesn't turn up the day they usually do, I worry and wonder what can have happened. But they usually let me know beforehand if they're not going to shop on a particular day. The shop is like my second home.' Rura never feels unsure of herself in any conversational situation, and she never feels that a conversation is awkward in any way. Tm always myself. I can't put on an act.' Let us now turn to our town informant, whom we can call Urba. Urba was born and grew up in a community a few tens of kilometres outside Uppsala. She moved to Uppsala when she was 14 and took a job at a factory. Apart from this, she has had a number of different jobs, as a butcher's assistant, housewife and assistant in a shoe shop, before taking up her present employment as a shop assistant in a food store in a large shopping centre. She lives in a flat in a high-rise block with her husband, who is a construction worker, and her younger son, who has just finished

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

45

his military service. Urba's parents live in a retirement flat in the same town, and keep in touch more or less every day. Ί can't always help them out, though. It's difficult when you're both working.' Apart from this, the couple spend most of their time with the family and with relatives still living in the community where Urba grew up. She does not see very much of her neighbours, 'though we do exchange a few words when we meet on the stairs'. 'Sometimes I chat to a friend on the phone, but we don't go and see each other very often — we mostly just talk on the phone.' Urba catches a bus to work every working day, the store being a few kilometres from her home. She is one of many employees, and her immediate superior is a group supervisor, who in turn answers to a store manager. It is a large store, in which each assistant is assigned a specific area of responsibility. Urba is responsible for household utensils and similar products, and her duties include ordering stock and 'rotating', i. e. being available for customers needing advice and information. She only recognizes a few of the customers who shop in the store. 'They're pensioners and elderly people who come in every day just to meet someone. Sometimes we exchange a few words, but often there isn't time — there's too much to do.' Usually she doesn't recognize the customers at all. 'There are always lots of people in the store — customers and sales reps who you don't know at all.' Urba often feels unsure of herself and uninformed when talking to other people, especially her superiors at work. 'It's a feeling of insecurity you have — you haven't the schooling — I wish I had more background. I often become uncertain when I'm talking to my boss or when I phone to order stock — it's difficult to find the words then.' But sometimes she also feels unsure of herself when dealing with customers: Ί often have to explain things, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. It doesn't feel nice when you're talking to someone who knows a lot more than you.' Urba feels it is usually the people concerned, but sometimes also the topic, that can make a conversational situation awkward and embarrassing. As will have become apparent, the conversational environments of our two informants are strikingly different. Obvious differences between Rura and Urba emerge, first of all, as regards personal relations. Rura has a great deal of in-depth contact with individuals outside her nuclear family. She knows virtually everyone she converses with, she generally knows them in more than one role function, and she is familiar with their background and circumstances. During the diary days, 94.3% of Rura's interlocutors were known to her, whereas only 5.7% could be assigned to the 'unknown' category. Urba, on the other hand, rarely mixes socially

46

Anna Malmberg & Bengt Nordberg

with people outside her nuclear family. The people she meets in her work are usually strangers and she meets them in one role function only. According to her diary entries, 44.2% of Urba's interlocutors can be assigned to the 'known' and as many as 55.8% to the 'unknown' category. Urba also meets far more people through work than Rura. Her network of contacts, in other words, is larger and more loosely knit than Rura's. These two women turn out to be very typical representatives of what has been described as the urban and the rural way of life, respectively. The two informants' contact networks have repercussions for the interaction types in which they become involved. Rura often finds herself in situations in which both personal and transactional interaction occurs. It is very unusual for her to talk to a customer in the shop without talking not just about the actual goods being bought, but also about personal matters. During the diary days, Rura's interaction can be broken down as follows: personal 74.9%, transactional 0.4% and personal+transactional 24.7%. Urba, on the other hand, generally keeps the two interaction types well apart. On the two days recorded in her diary, her interaction is as follows: personal 71.9%, transactional 25.5% and personal+transactional 2.7%. Rura's contact network is not functionally subdivided in the same way as Urba's. Urba's life generally is more functionally compartmentalized than Rura's. Urba distinguishes strictly between work and leisure and switches between different roles in her daily life, whereas Rura seems to have, to say the least, indistinct dividing lines between work and private life. Another striking difference between the two informants is, as we have seen, the way they perceive themselves in ordinary conversational situations. Rura says that she never feels unsure of herself in conversation with other people, irrespective of her relationship to them, while Urba reports that she is often linguistically insecure and feels at a disadvantage in various conversational situations, especially conversations with her superiors. This may of course be due to personality differences, but it seems reasonable to assume that the setting in which Rura lives her daily life gives her a strength and a sense of security in her linguistic activity as well.

5. Discussion and conclusions We have attempted in the foregoing to describe certain aspects of the linguistic ecology of an urban and a rural contemporary environment. In doing so, we have been compelled to impose certain limitations and make

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

47

a number of generalizations. For one thing, our account may have given the impression that the two municipal areas chosen are more diametrically opposed on a rural —urban scale than is really the case. Uppsala has admittedly come a long way in urban development in terms of its economic structure and the mobility of its population, but, with its roughly 160,000 inhabitants, of whom 130,000 live in the built-up area of the city itself, it is not exactly a big metropolis. The country parishes chosen, for their part, do not show a great deal of resemblance to the turn-of-the-century rural environment that forms the idyllic setting of many a Swedish children's book; they too have experienced a modernization and urbanization of their occupational structure, settlement patterns and life modes. They have small built-up areas (one with 550 and the other with 240 inhabitants at the time of the study), and a not insignificant subset of the occupations represented here are shared with Uppsala, chiefly in private and public services and craft occupations. Examples of the kind of composite life modes described by Pedersen (this volume) can no doubt also be found. Nevertheless, our two rural parishes are very close to the average occupational structure of sparsely populated areas of Sweden. And even if there are quite a number of people with the same job title in the town and the country, the actual nature and the social setting of their work tends to differ, as the individual examples, among other things, indicate. In this chapter we have deliberately confined ourselves to examining the rural —urban dimension and consequently passed over in silence variation in other dimensions, although we do have data on other background variables besides place of residence. A defining property of urbanization which cannot be abstracted away is the associated transformation of economic and occupational structure, which means that the populations of urban and rural areas today exhibit very different socioeconomic distributions (see above, p. 24 f.). If we break the results down by both residential environment (urban — rural) and socioeconomic class (manual worker —non-manual employee), we find that on several variables the difference between manual and non-manual employees is greater than that between town and country. On others, the opposite is true. In certain cases the socioeconomic factor reinforces the residential factor, in others they neutralize each other. For most of the components which we have regarded here as constituting the linguistic environment, the difference between country and town is more accentuated for non-manual employees than for manual. In other words, to describe both the urban and the rural linguistic environment as monolithic, as we have done, represents a significant simplification. The situation is more complex than this, but

48

Anna Malmberg & Bengt Nordberg

nevertheless we would claim that, as a description of overall ecological conditions, our account is correct. Another limitation we have imposed on our description is that it refers only to the conversational environment, i. e. the speech-situational circumstances surrounding the activity of conversing. We have said very little about the other linguistic activities of writing, reading and listening. The overall impression of the results we have presented is, first, that the conversational environment differs in key respects between town and country and, second, that the rural conversational environment tends to be both more informal and more uniform. If our initial assumptions are correct, the rural conversational environment would tend more than the urban to favour the use of 'intimate language'. Data on the other linguistic activities support such a conclusion concerning the linguistic environment as a whole. In the town, people write more and devote a larger proportion of writing time to active writing, i. e. composing their own texts, and what they write falls within the professional domain to a larger extent than in the country. The same is largely true of reading, especially that relating to the societal sphere. The rural conversational environment, then, is more informal and more uniform than the urban. In the country, people meet fewer persons per day, and are more often in private places when they engage in conversation. They are more likely to know the individuals they are talking to and more often mix topics from different domains in what is felt to be one and the same situation. Country dwellers, in other words, make less strict a distinction than townspeople between different interaction types, and personal and transactional interaction are appreciably more likely to occur together or perhaps, rather, fuse within what is perceived as a single speech situation. In the countryside, moreover, the separation of functions among different individuals is not as marked as in the town. This is illustrated, in particular, by the individual examples. Rural residents meet more individual people with whom they maintain a multiplex role relationship. The comparison between weekdays and weekends also indicates that life in the country is less strictly compartmentalized than in the town. The heterogeneous picture of the urban environment is heightened by the fact that the difference in linguistic environment between manual and nonmanual employees is greater in the town than in the country on virtually all the variables we have studied. Generally speaking, in fact, the responses given by the urban informants show a considerably greater dispersion than those of their rural counterparts; variation in language use and the situational framework for it is more striking in the town than in the country.

Language Use in Rural and Urban Settings

49

Nor should one disregard the fact that urban residents, according to their own reports, are linguistically more active than country people — not as noticeably regarding conversation as when it comes to writing and reading, both of these being activities which primarily require (and develop) a command of the 'language of distance'. There thus appear to be fairly appreciable differences between presentday urban and rural settings as regards the set of linguistic situations available and their relative frequencies. The results we have presented — albeit with a relatively unsophisticated method — seem moreover to bear out the assumptions about the urbanized and, indirectly, the rural linguistic environment which we made in our introduction. Urban society — and hence its linguistic environment — is more heterogeneous, compartmentalized, offers more numerous, but more transitory and superficial personal contacts, a larger element of purely transactional interaction, and all in all a greater diversity of situations, all of which demand a large measure of linguistic flexibility. Rural society — and its linguistic environment — is more uniform, country folk appear to have a more holistic view of situations and individuals, and the various elements of the social and physical surroundings seem more integrated. Networks are more closely knit, and interaction with specific individuals generally seems to be more multifaceted. The rural area thus appears to provide a conversational environment which is largely informal and which consequently offers plenty of scope for using intimate language. The urban area, on the other hand, exhibits a linguistic environment which can be said to be formal to a larger extent and therefore promotes the use of language of distance more than the rural area. However, it is important not to exaggerate the differences. The quantitative differences we have reported are rarely dramatic; there are no absolute distinctions here, but rather frequency differences, and not always very large ones. The urban linguistic environment, too, is predominantly informal. Of the total time spent in conversation, our urban informants devote 60.1% to conversations in the kind of situation we have regarded as the most informal, i. e. with known individuals in private places, involving a personal type of interaction. Situations in which intimate language can be used are abundant in the town, too. The question then is what consequences the situations described may have for language use, primarily for the use of a more or less local dialect as opposed to the standard language (consequences in terms of language structure) and of a more complete, explicit and situation-independent, 'formal' mode of expression as compared with a more fragmentary, implicit

50

Anna Malmberg & Bengt Nordberg

and situation-dependent, 'informal' mode (stylistic consequences). The fact that urban residents talk to more people, and more strangers, more often about subjects in the professional domain and more often in the shape of purely transactional interaction, should not only engender greater linguistic flexibility, but also a need for and adjustment to a more explicit style. At any rate, the urban environment as a whole involves a larger number of situations which require this mode of expression. As regards the influence of the ecological factors described on the use of local dialect as opposed to a more or less standard-like variety, the results of our study are more difficult to interpret. We have just seen that urban residents on average spend almost as much time as country people conversing in the most private and informal situation (60.1% compared with 61.9% of total conversation time). This alone, then, cannot explain why dialect is so rarely used in towns. But it may be possible to identify other factors in the two linguistic environments which could conceivably contribute to the stronger position of dialect in the rural setting. On the one hand, our data show that, proportionately, people in the country talk to far more individuals who are well-known to .them than people in a town. And, on the other hand, they interact more in situations that can be assigned to the composite or mixed interaction type (personal-f transactional), and in most of these situations they know their interlocutors personally. It is difficult to imagine people using anything other than the local variety in such situations. Our study may be said to have offered certain clues to an understanding of the parallels between urbanization and dialect levelling, but the evidence is hardly conclusive. It can probably be claimed that what we call an informal conversational environment is a necessary but hardly a sufficient condition for local dialect to be preserved. Other conditions, for example of an attitudinal nature, also have to be met. This study has nevertheless highlighted a number of interesting differences between town and country as regards the language-ecological conditions that shape conversations, and between the linguistic behaviour of urban and rural individuals. To progress further, however, future studies will need to work at a more concrete and detailed level.

ROGER ANDERSSON & MATS THELANDER

Internal Migration, Biography Formation, and Linguistic Change The basis for our contribution is a cross-disciplinary study of the linguistic and social adjustment which may be exhibited by people who have moved from rural to urban surroundings within Sweden. The paper begins with a section that briefly describes the conditions for and the historical course of urbanization in Sweden — to a great extent this account is also applicable to the rest of the Nordic countries and can serve as a background to other chapters in this volume as well. In section 2 we try to position the methodology of our study in relation to that of other migration studies, and in section 3 we present the areas from which our material was gathered. The material is described in somewhat more detail in section 4, and in the following section the results of the study are reported. Not least in this fifth section we have striven to integrate reasoning and conclusions from both of our disciplines, human geography and sociolinguistics — an integration that is admittedly to some extent detrimental to the coherence of the presentation. The kaleidoscopic and somewhat rhapsodic account also means that our results do not lend themselves to brief summary. The sixth and concluding chapter should therefore be seen as a theoretical and methodological rounding-off rather than an attempt at a summary.

1. The urbanization of Sweden: a historical and geographical background It is a common misconception that mobility was slight in agrarian society prior to industrialization. Even though migrations across long distances did take place — the best-known examples being emigration to America and the seasonal migrations of certain occupational groups — mobility in Swedish agrarian society was nevertheless more local than is the case today. The economic activity encountered, measured, and analyzed by regional geographers, for example, appeared to have sprung from naturally deter-

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Roger Andersson & Mats Thelander

mined conditions. The concept of a 'natural region' had a given place in these ideographically oriented studies, which stressed the unique character of each region, molded by the interplay of man and nature. Even though the local nature-based form of society did not reign unchallenged in Sweden — for instance, this pattern was broken by towns and regions that produced goods for sale in national and international markets — it did come to mark the life and culture of many regions and their inhabitants. On the linguistic level, local continuity could allow the relatively undisturbed reproduction of local features — dialects thrived. When new winds began to blow and the role of cities as centers of education, culture, and economic progress was readily combined with liberal and socialistic ideas about a new society, things rural and local came to be ideologically associated with economic backwardness and cultural provincialism. Those moving from the countryside to the city therefore had to face not only a different and quantitatively dominant way of life and language usage but also a new ethos — modernism. It is no exaggeration to maintain that the last one hundred years of Swedish urbanization has entailed a revolutionary transformation of Swedish society. Four generations may seem like a long period of time, but it is not more than what many individuals have in fact experienced. The social transformation whose most manifest geographical expression is precisely the clear victory of the urban over the rural has had a deep impact on all areas of life: work, education, housing, mobility, social relations, culture, and language. In terms of broad social tendencies Sweden is hardly different from other industrialized countries. In one sense it is also relatively easy to identify the fundamental structural cause of this social transformation, including urbanization: industrialism with its precondition and lever wage labor, the central importance of which was to: (a) create a 'free and mobile' labor force, which could move to wherever an acceptable living could be made, (b) establish the conditions for an efficient organization of labor (vertical and horizontal), (c) establish the conditions for the production of value, the surplus from which could be accumulated by industrialists, banks and finance companies, the state and municipalities, and to (d) create a market for mass consumption. After the rather comprehensive social differentiation in the Swedish countryside during the 18th and 19th centuries — leading to a rising share of

Internal Migration, Biography Formation, and Linguistic Change

53

landless people — the proportion of wage earners among the economically active population in 1870 amounted to 60%. The share grew steadily, reaching 70% in 1920 and 90% in 1970 (Korpi 1978:73). Wage labor is a form of production that promotes an agglomerative structure. The organization of workers in a certain activity under the control of a land-owner or a capitalist proved to assume agglomerative forms even before the actual breakthrough of industry. With the introduction of mechanical machinery and the factory system, the urban tendency of industrialism was reinforced. In Sweden, however, this urban tendency assumes a decentralized — one might add small-scale — manifestation. Around 1870, on the threshold of Sweden's first radical wave of industrialization, 13% (540,000) of the country's 4.2 million inhabitants lived in cities. At this time some 64% of industrial workers were found in cities, a proportion that as a matter of fact declined sharply and significantly up to the end of the century, when only 36% of manufactural industry was found in cities — despite the fact that cities had multiplied both in size and number. Behind this apparently rapid ruralization of industrial production of goods we find, however, precisely the opposite development — the dissemination of industry and smaller urban agglomerations to the previously agrarian countryside. Just before the turn of the century industrialization shifted to sectors oriented toward the domestic market, such as the foodstuffs, metal, and mechanical industries. The larger cities regained their leading role. The breakthrough of large-scale industry in the 1920s gave the big cities a favorable base for further expansion, although this expansion was moderated by the outbreak of World War II. From then on the service sector — especially the public one — has played the leading role in the population growth of most big cities. 'The meaning of industrialism is the urban society', says Henri Lefebvre. This seems to be true, but only if one realizes that industrialism is so much more than the industrial production of goods. Macrosocial configurations changed with the expansion of industrial capitalism, but so did microsocial relations. Wage labor in its industrial form places great demands on communication — in planning and production stages as well as in the distribution and marketing of the products which to an ever greater extent came to be sold in interregional and international markets. With the growth of these contacts, both in terms of intensity and extent, horizons expanded, and a cosmopolitan dimension was overlaid on a lingering local identity. It was hardly the need for local

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Roger Andersson & Mats Thelander

anchorage — territorial and social — that diminished, merely the possibility of maintaining continuity in local societies and individual life trajectories. Even though the distinction between rural and urban populations and settlements is drawn in Swedish population statistics at a very low level relative to international standards — 200 inhabitants is the agglomeration limit — figure 1 can be seen as a good albeit schematic indication of the continuous course of demographic urbanization in Sweden during the last century. Behind the apparently linear national development, however, we find highly differentiated developments, uneven in time and space, regarding individual regions, areas, and towns. In the latter part of our paper, this heterogeneity will be illuminated by an account of a case study of the course of urbanization in two Swedish regions — the northern part of West Bothnia (Västerbotten) and the northwestern corner of Södermanland (see general map p. 10). Population (in millions) Total population Built-up areas

Sparsely ""*-- populated areas

1800

1820

1840

1860

1880

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

Year Figure 1: The rural-urban settlement pattern in Sweden 1800 — 1980 (Based on Sveriges officiella Statistik: Folk- och bostadsräkningen 1980, 2:3, table 1 [Official Statistics of Sweden: Population and Housing Census 1980])

Urbanization will be understood here in its demographic sense — as a movement from rural to urban settlement. With the expansion of agglomerations and the spread of urban culture, people living in sparsely settled areas in fact can — in a sense — become urbanized right where they live. We do not intend to dwell upon this aspect of the concept of urbanization and the linguistic consequences it might entail. Since our study at the same time focuses on the linguistic adaptation of the individual, the methodological challenge will be to describe, on the basis of individual migrant life stories, the connection between migration and linguistic change at such a level of abstraction that structural causes will also have a chance to emerge.

Internal Migration, Biography Formation, and Linguistic Change

55

2. Studying the linguistic consequences of migration — a discussion of methods It is primarily only in recent years that sociolinguistics has paid any great attention to the connection between language and migration. It would appear that there are two reasons for this interest. One is that sociolinguistics generally strives as far as possible to describe reality as it actually looks. After all, thirty years ago it was this ambition that led spoken language research into the new channel that would become sociolinguistics — it was a reaction against the tendency of linguistics at that time to see language communities as more homogeneous than they ever are normally and the refusal to recognize language variation as a research issue for linguists. But sociolinguistics, too, was initially guilty of making unnatural simplifications. In mapping variation in an urban dialect, researchers gathered their material only from individuals who were born in the city. To take into consideration those who moved there — not seldom half of the population of a city — was believed to lead too far afield, even though no one directly denied that the way these people speak is also a part of the picture. By tardily focusing on language and migration, sociolinguistics is thus making up for its juvenile sins and living up to its realistic credo. The other reason why language and migration stands out as an attractive field of research is that it has gradually become more and more clear that geographic mobility — to a greater degree than the impact of schooling or the broadcast media — is the factor that has perhaps most vigorously fueled the tremendous leveling of dialects that has characterized so many linguistic communities over the past forty years. If one wishes to find out how people's speech is influenced by migration, then one must decide, on the one hand, which migrants one wants to study and, on the other hand, with what other people these migrants are to be compared. Further, one must choose what level of description the linguistic analysis is to have and with what technique any changes in the migrants' language is to be registered. In the following we will address each of these three problems. 2.1 Choice of informants

As figure 2 shows, migrants can be selected in basically four different ways in relation to where they come from and where they moved to. We then assume that the study is to be carried out using established techniques of variational linguistics which do not confine themselves to the study of only one individual.

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Roger Andersson & Mats Thelander

n, rs>s 0/δ 'stod'-fronting past tense ALSO I

r r r r r r r

tri = tri = tri = tri = tri = tri = tri =

0.85 0.75 0.77 0.81 0.71 0.85 0.86

With respect to a couple of the variables, the women show better agreement between network score and extent of dialect coloring than the group as a whole, whereas the rest are on precisely the same level, a finding which corresponds to Milroy's results on the level of the individual (L. Milroy 1980). While the differences which were purely sex-correlated were all individual lexical variables in which the dialectal realization in many cases was stigmatized, most of the network-correlated differences involve general variables (nos. 1, 5, 9 and 10), to which we can add one lexical variable having no stigmatized dialect form (variable no. 15 I).

10. Susan's language The woman who is most markedly rural ideologically deviates linguistically from the others. Only six of the variables are realized dialectally to the extent we would expect from Susan's network score. Five of these variables (nos. 5, 6, 8, 9, 15) comprise the most resistant dialect variables in the material as a whole. They belong to both the dialectal and the regional norm. Everyone with a network score of 2 or above has at least 90% dialectal forms. Thus, it is not possible to use these variables to signal something local or rural. With two of the variables the degree of dialect is less than expected, variables 1 and 12, for which Susan has no dialect forms at all. None of these variables attract any attention among local language users, neither weak diphthongization of long e and β or [vo] for [να] var 'was', only the strong diphthongization to [εϊ], [oi] is enough to make people react.

Linguistic Variation and Composite Life Modes

111

But it is another matter with regard to the variables where Susan has more dialect forms than expected. They are nearly all variables which have symbolic value for this age group as a whole. In view of Susan's proclaimed rural ideology, it is tempting to interpret her excessive use of dialectal forms in precisely these variables as a signal that she wants to be identified with the rural group, not with the worker. Variables 2, 4 and 11 can be interpreted as rural markers. They do not point to locals as opposed to newcomers, but rather to the most countrified of the locals, the farmers. Variables 13 and 14 are masculine markers, but since the men have more dialect forms than the women, they also point in the direction of the local and rural; cf. the fact that variable 11 is a masculine marker, and at the same time, among the men, a rural marker. Susan uses these linguistic tidbits to moderate her personal appearance, the way she presents herself to others, in the same way that the young women in Oberwart chose to speak more and more German, thereby indicating that they prefer the life mode of the worker instead of the traditional agricultural way of life (Gal 1978, cf. also Le Page & TabouretKeller 1985).9 Most of these markers are lexical variables, i. e. variables which are easier to change. They are well-suited as a signaling device. But what about the general variables 2 and 4? An investigation of the individual words in which these variables are realized dialectally reveals that they are on the way to becoming lexicalized. Four of the informants only have a nasalized vowel in the pronoun den, masc. 'it' and the substantive gang 'time, occasion'. Only in the speech of Georg, Jens Erik and Lene can the nasalized vowel be heard in other words. With these three we must consider the variable as general, while it has been lexicalized with the other four, although not as clearly as is the case with the nasalized vowel in the pronoun ban 'he', which goes its own special way. There are no examples of a totally dialectal pronunciation of den and gang in these texts. Their lexicalization only means that these words are the only ones that are pronounced with a nasalized vowel every now and then. The standard pronunciation has spread so much throughout the vocabulary that only these very frequent words have retained the possibility of dialectal realization. 9

Susan's language comes close to what has been termed a demonstration dialect in another connection (Brinkmann to Broxten 1986), cf. also Gregersen & Pedersen 1991:65 for a similar case. However, I have no evidence that Susan uses a greater number of dialect features in a formal situation than in informal conversation.

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Inge Lise Pedersen

This same tendency is found with regard to variable 4. It is the words andre^ asldre and aldrig Others, older, never' that are heard for the most part without d, but also force/are and mindre 'parents, smaller', whereas hindre and andre 'hinder, change' always have the standard pronunciation in this age group. This is the last stop before the terminal for the lexical spread of the standard pronunciation of these variables. It is characteristic of the language of this age group that there are a number of examples of the fact that general differences in pronunciation have become, or are about to become, lexicalized and thereby easier to manipulate. If someone wants to be identified with the more rural part of the population he can easily express this by means of a dialectal pronunciation of a little handful of words. In the case of Susan, this works. She is thought of by other locals as one of those who speaks very Funen. On closer inspection the occurrence of dialect forms of the individual variables is quite interesting. For example, it does not resemble the general picture when we note that she has no traces at all of diphthongization, and yet she has the nasalized vowel. But this deviation from the general picture is not of a type that is noticeable to people around her, probably because her intonation and the core group of regional variables (variables 5 — 9) anchor her language locally. In contrast to the newcomers' occasional use of a nasalized vowel, for example, in a very near-standard context.

11. Conclusion Linguistic standardization is not a mechanical consequence of the transition from a rural to an urban occupation. A better measurement of the degree of linguistic urbanization is achieved through an analysis of the informants' network character. In a community like Vissenbjerg, where there is an old local worker population alongside the farmers, and thus two local groups having their own respective cultural norms, however, the network analysis does not suffice. Those who say [de^n] are not necessarily less locally oriented than those who say [de?], but they have a different local reference group. At the present level of development of the regional standard it is possible for speakers to moderate the way they present themselves to others by using either a dialectal or a standard pronunciation of a relatively small number of words. In the material I have collected there are some who choose to signal their rural ties in this way, while others whose local

Linguistic Variation and Composite Life Modes

113

integration is just as great do not use these markers, or use them much less often. Linguistic groups are not automatically isomorphic with social groups, nor with groups arrived at through network analysis. Here, I have attempted to show that a life mode analysis can help to explain why some speakers choose to maintain a language with strong local coloring. Language use is often described as an expression of a lifestyle, without any precise explanation of what this includes (cf. for example Rickford 1987). The life mode analysis, with its emphasis on the fact that one's life mode consists of both a material and an ideological aspect, can lead to a better understanding of the relationship between language and social identity.

114

Inge Lise Pedersen c a u

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Ο τON Ο ON CN CN

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c

3 CM

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185

The Pronoun tainä T in Urban Sweden Finnish

if PRO + VERB • o(o)+0

m o(o)+c ole+0 • ole+C

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Figure 5: The use of PRO + VERB vs 0 + VERB in the positive indicative for the whole sample15

and SFiO. For the former, who, more than any other group, use the stFi synthetic, pronoun-less variant, we have not been able to suggest any explanation. Regarding the latter group, SFiO, we refer to our interpretation of the results in our discussion under 5.2.1. 5.2.1 Older South-west Finnish speakers (SFi) The data used for this section only include positive clauses.16 Negative and elliptic clauses are excluded. The purpose of presenting these results, which is done separately for each dialect and age group, is to show how the different PRO variants are combined with forms of the verb and how the PRO variants in these combinations are distributed in stressed and unstressed/neutral positions.17 (Tab. 3 s. p. 186.)

15

16

17

A consistent trend among all dialect groups was that the PRO + VERB combination was more frequently used in positive clauses, the 0 + VERB combination in negative clauses. Negative clauses as such were less frequent than positive. We have used the bisyllabic verb stem of the verb olla 'to be, have', OLE-, and its monosyllabic variant O(O)-, to indicate all verbs in the tables and figures. All verbs cannot, however, have monosyllabic variants. Among the five that can, the most frequent is olla, followed by tulla 'come' and mennd 'go, leave'. The remaining two verbs are panna 'put' and sanoa 'say, tell'. The material discussed in 5.2.1 — 5.2.6 is thus identical with that represented by light grey bars in figure 5.

186

Jarmo Lainio & Erling Wände

Prosody

minä

Stressed Neutral Stressed Neutral

2.5 — 2.5 —

Stressed Neutral Stressed Neutral

1.0 0.5

Total

PRO variant mW

mV

Verb stem + Suffix

10.8 8.4 —

OLE+C

18.7 24.1

13.8

OLE + 0

0.5 1.5 0.5 2.0

2.0 — 2.0

0(0) + C

6.5

67.5

26.2

n=13

n=137

n=53

N=10:

OF = 6

OM=4

— —

9.4

O(0) + 0

Total

13.3 17.8 21.2 37.9 1.5 4.0 0.5 4.0

100.2 =203

Stressed =36.5 Neutral =63.7

Table 3: Distribution of PRO variants, related to stress and verb form, among older SFi speakers. Positive clauses

The variant minä is not likely to be combined with monosyllabic verb stems and mV is, as expected, mostly (in fact only) used in unstressed position. A characteristic of SFi seems to be that bisyllabic verb stems are preferred, irrespective of which PRO variant is chosen (table 3). In addition, the subject person suffix is more often than not omitted from the verb. However, there are some complicating constraints that must be taken into account. In our data, the subject person suffix is generally deleted in prevocalic position and when preceding heterorganic consonants (not shown in table 3). Similar tendencies have been noted for the Pori dialect (Leonard 1986:207; as for Pori, see general map) and for the border dialect of Häme and Savo dialects (Itkonen 1972:137 f£). Itkonen indicates that stress patterns influence the outcome, but his material was inadequate for an analysis of the -N morpheme of 1st PERS SG (op. cit. 149, 152). Leskinen (1971) has presented similar results for the South-eastern dialects. Mielikäinen (1981a:283) studied final -N in South Savo dialects and found similar tendencies, among others that -N is most often deleted when preceding sibilants and stops. Mielikäinen mentions stress as a critical factor, but does not deal with its consequences (op. cit. 282). Both Mielikäinen and Leskinen propose that if-N makes up the entire morpheme

The Pronoun minä T in Urban Sweden Finnish

187

(as in 1st PERS SG) it tends to be deleted less frequently than when it is part of a morpheme. Though we have not been able to compare -N as a full morpheme with cases where it is part of a morpheme, it seems clear from our results that, irrespective of phonological context, abundant deletion of -N as a full morpheme occurs. Though neither the present study nor the Finnish ones mentioned try to correlate all possible contextual linguistic factors with the degree of deletion of both the PRO and the person ending -N, the results available indicate that there are no consistent differences regarding the importance of the phonological context between our data and the Finnish ones. For the present study it is also important to note that Mielikäinen and Leskinen consider 48% deletion to indicate that -N is generally not deleted (Leskinen 1971:365; Mielikäinen 1981a:300). Even if the retained occurrences amount to 52%, this proportion of deletions may, however, be interpreted as evidence to the contrary: the person suffix is actually not needed even in the 0-PRO cases, i. e. 0PRO -f VERB-|-0 in our notation. This could be a sign of syntheticity being of less importance in the FiFi dialects than has earlier been generally believed (see also figure 5). A summarized description of SFi speakers' use of 1st PERS SG PRO + VERB would be: the positive indicative is represented by a combination of mW + OLE + 0; the (long-vowel) pronoun is in frequent use, even in a prosodically neutral position, where, however, mV also occurs frequently. The (short-vowel) monosyllabic pronoun is in general use, which is quite a recent innovation in South-west Finnish and apparently among the present SFi speakers, but the use of monosyllabic verb forms (O(O)-) does not covary with this PRO variant. For the verb stem, which seems to be the main indigenous variant (OLE-), a pronoun occurs in neutral position more than twice as frequently as it is deleted (table 3 and figure 5). This can be interpreted as a sign of analyticity in the South-west Finnish dialects. We may vaguely recognize here the binary use of stFi (as outlined in figure 2), i. e. stressed minä and 0-PRO + VERB + C (cf. table 3 and figure 5), since minä is almost exclusively used in stressed position. This, however, is not a dominant or typical feature among the SFi speakers. The PRO most frequently used is mW, both in stressed and in neutral positions (table 3). The PRO is used almost twice as often in unstressed/neutral position as in stressed. More than 60% of all PRO + VERB occurrences lack the person ending. This, to our mind, confirms that the South-west Finnish indicative differs from the prescriptive model of stFi.

188

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5.2.2 Older Harne speakers (HFi)

mW

PRO variant mV mV1V2

Prosody

minä

Stressed Neutral Stressed Neutral

9.9 4.2 1.4 0.5

9.4 11.3 9.0 6.6

Stressed Neutral Stressed Neutral

0.9 — — —

4.2 9.4 1.9 0.9

3.3 — —

—

Total

16.9

52.7

28.3

1.0

1.0

n = 36

n=112

n = 60

n= 2

n= 2

N = 7:

OF=4

OM = 3

0.9 15.6 — 8.5

0.5 0.5 — -

Other

0.5 0.5 — -

Verb stem + Suffix Total

OLE+0

21.2 32.1 10.4 15.6

0(0) + C

12.7

O(O) + 0

1.9 0.9

OLE+C

5.1

—

99.9 = 212

Stressed =38.6 Neutral =61.3

Table 4: Distribution of PRO variants, related to stress and verb form, among older HFi speakers. Positive clauses

The basic pattern among HFi speakers is different from that observed among SFi speakers (table 4). The variant minä occurs noticeably more often, and the more stFi-like PRO-drop indicative combined with a bisyllabic verb more frequently has a retained person ending, OLE + C (table 4 and figure 5). Monosyllabic verb stems are more frequent than among SFi speakers. Nevertheless, for the HFi group, too, the characteristic combination is mW + OLE-. mW is used both as a stressed and an unstressed variant. We consider this pattern characteristic of the native PRO variant of a dialect. Of the other pronoun variants minä is mainly used in stressed position, mV in unstressed position. As in SFi, mV generally, not to say exclusively, occurs unstressed, which could be interpreted as a typological shift towards analyticity. This is probably even truer of the frequent use of mää, the main variant of the dialect, e.g. in the combination mW + O(O) + C. For this as for other groups it is impossible to tell whether use of the pronoun variants is exclusively dependent on prosodic factors, whether it depends on external factors, such as degree of formality and accommodation to another variety, or whether these factors interact.

189

The Pronoun minä ' in Urban Sweden Finnish

The results for the HFi group show, similarly to those for SFi, an abundant use of unstressed pronouns (tables 3 and 4). One difference is the earlier mentioned fact that HFi speakers use the synthetic person ending (OLE + C, O(O) + C) more frequently. In this respect, the HFi group could be said to use the analytic combinations slightly less than the SFi group. 5.2.3 Older North Finns (NFiO) PRO variant mV mie

Verb stem + mV1V2 Suffix Total

Prosody

minä

mW

Stressed Neutral Stressed Neutral

5.7 7.2 3.3 6.7

3.8 7.2 0.5 1.9

— 1.4 — 1.4

Stressed Neutral Stressed Neutral

0.5 2.9 — 1.0

1.4 1.0 — —

0.5 3.3 — 0.5

0.5 1.4 — 1.9

— -

Total

27.3

15.8

7.1

48.7

1.0

n=57

n=33

n=15

n=102

n =2

N = 7:

OF=5

OM = 2

8.6

-

26.8

1.0

3.3 6.2

18.1 OLE+C

43.6 7.1

OLE + 0

16.2

O(O) + C

8.6 — 3.4

2.9

O(O) + 0

99.9 =209

Stressed =28.1 Neutral =71.8

Table 5: Distribution of PRO variants, related to stress and verb form, among older NFi speakers. Positive clauses

An obvious characteristic of the older North Finnish group, more so than of all the other groups, is that most pronoun variants are used in unstressed position, which differs sharply from stFi use of pronouns. Furthermore, the NFiO show the largest internal differences. This subgroup is quite heterogeneous: the men use minä to a large extent, some of the women consistently stick to the old dialect variant mie, while other women equally consistently have started using the non-native mää (cf. also table 2). This makes a contradictory impression, which however has a correspondence in the sharply opposing views and opinions that could be detected in the background survey of the North Finnish group, regarding their own immigrant situation, the situation in their region of origin in Finland and so on (Lainio 1984).

190

Jarmo Lainio & Erling Wände

Concerning 0-PRO + VERB it seems clear that practically only bisyllabic forms are used without a PRO (figure 5). The dialectal variant mie is frequent, especially in the combination NEUTRAL PRO + VERB + C. Its extensive use in other positions as well shows that it can be considered typical for the dialect. The variants minä, mW and mV are most often used in unstressed position (neutral), which probably reflects the fact that they are innovations in the dialect. (See further section 6.1.) 5.2.4 Younger North Finns (NFiY)

Prosody

minä

mW

Stressed Neutral Stressed Neutral

11.,9 6,.0 7,.9 3,.3

7.9 5.3 2.6 2.6

Stressed Neutral Stressed Neutral

0,.7 1.3 0..7 1..3

Total

PRO variant mV mie

0.7 11. 9 4. 6

4.6 9.3 2.0 4.6

mV1V2

2.0

OLE+C 0.7

OLE+0

0.7 — -

1. 3 2. 6 — -

1.3 0.7 — 0.7 0.7 -

33. 1

19.1

21. 1

22.5

4.1

n=50

n = 29

n=32

n=34

n=6

N = 9:

YF = 5

YM = 4

—

Verb stem + Suffix Total

0(0) + C O(O) + 0

27.1 32.5 13.2 15.1 2.0 6.6 1.4 2.0

99.9 = 151

Stressed =43.7 Neutral = 56.2

Table 6: Distribution of PRO variants, related to stress and verb form, among younger NFi speakers. Positive clauses

Among the younger North Finns only bisyllabic verb stems occur without a pronoun (0-PRO) (figure 5). The innovations to the dialect, i. e. minä, mW, are often used in stressed positions. But at the same time, pronouns as such are basically used in unstressed positions, in more than half of the cases, which mainly reflects the distribution of mV and mie. The dialect variant mie shows a wide range of use, mainly unstressed. Regarding frequency, the use of minä shows some similarity with the older North Finnish speakers, but not regarding prosody, since unstressed position is less frequent among NFiY. Compared with NFiO, the NFiY are closer to the stFi combination of stressed PRO + VERB + C (tables 5 and 6), but also regarding the synthetic 0-PRO + OLE+C combination (figure 5).

The Pronoun minä T in Urban Sweden Finnish

191

Another difference between the generations is that the younger make greater use of mW in stressed position and of the monosyllabic m V in unstressed position. If these facts are combined with the circumstances mentioned above — that the typical dialect variant is most frequently used as an unstressed variant — this can be interpreted as a system in change, where mie is on its way out among the younger generation North Finns. The contrast with the older generation (NFiO) is obvious; m Vis replacing mie in unstressed position. Moreover, the younger speakers have adopted the stFi model, in so far as mind is used as a stressed variant. This difference cannot be explained by educational or occupational background factors, nor did the recording situations differ in ways that could cause systematic differences between the groups. 5.2.5 Older North Karelians (EFiO) Table 7 shows that the variation in the use of pronouns is considerable within this subgroup, which could mean that the structure of the indicative as it is understood by these speakers is in a process of change. The most frequent variant is minä, which is partly to be expected, since this form occurs as a dialect variant in several East Finnish dialects and is also supported by stFi. The other dialect variant, mie, on the contrary, seems to be little used. As in all other groups except SFi, the 0-PRO occurs most frequently with bisyllabic verbs with an intact suffix, i. e. 0-PRO + OLE + C (figure 5). West Finnish combinations are entering the spoken language of the North Karelians. A common feature of these innovations (mVV and mV) is that they are mostly used in unstressed positions. In this dialect group, too, the combination of minä with a monosyllabic (O)O + 0 is used. It is thus evident that not one of the dialect groups, not even the older North Karelians, avoids using the more analytic combinations of (the unstressed) NEUTR PRO + VERB, which differ from the combinations prescribed by stFi norms (as given in figure 2). A further characteristic of the older North Karelians is that the dialectal indicative minä/mie + OLE-, with an unstressed pronoun, constitutes more than one fourth of all positive indicatives containing a pronoun. This is counter to a traditional view, according to which this speaker group is among the linguistically most conservative and therefore, by definition, should use synthetic combinations. (Tab. 7 s. p. 192.) A feature common to most of the subgroups of older speakers and NFiY is that 0-PRO is almost exclusively used with bisyllabic verbs, most often with OLE-f C. But OLE-f0 is also used, which contradicts what Martin (1989:236), for instance, has considered possible for American Finnish: verb

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