Rinkeby Swedish

Rinkebysvenska ("Rinkeby Swedish") is a common term for varities of Swedish spoken mainly in suburbs with a high or very high proportion of immigrants and immigrant descendants. Rinkeby in Stockholm is one such suburb, but the term Rinkebysvenska may sometimes be used for similar varieties in other Swedish cities as well.

Opinions among linguists differ on whether to regard Rinkebysvenska as a sociolect, dialect, ethnolect, or maybe a "multiethnolect". Since the number of involved influencing languages is rather large, and extremely few speakers are likely to be fluent in more than a two or three of these, the definition of pidgin language may appear more to the point than that of mixed language. They may also be characterized as a register for informal communication between peers, since the speakers often use them only in specific social contexts and switch to other varieties for instance at home or if interviewed for radio. The status of Rinkebysvenska can in some ways be compared to that of African American Vernacular English in the US.

Professor Ulla-Britt Kotsinas, who is a scholar frequently cited on Rinkebysvenska, argues that these varieties primarily are spoken by teenagers from suburbs were immigrants and immigrant descendants are concentrated. According to her, these varieties are best to be understood as expressions of youth culture: The language is a marker of belonging to a certain subculture and at the same time opposition against a perceived mainstream non-immigrant culture that seems not to value the immigrant descendants anyway.

Rinkeby Swedish and similar varieties thus express the belonging to the rather large group of youths that have grown up in post-industrial Sweden but have roots elsewhere. This post-industrial society is, among other things, signified by a drastically pronunced segregation and unproportionally high unemployment figures for youths with immigrant background. Except for the fact that the linguistic distance is greater, Kotsinas sees in principle no difference from the suburban and urban working class varieties that a century ago followed industrial revolution and urbanization.

Variants of Rinkeby Swedish are reported from suburbs of Stockholm, Malmö, and Gothenburg with a large immigrant dominance. These variants tend to be based on the local town dialects, or on the variety of Standard Swedish tought in school. As pidgins, these varieties can be described as having a somewhat simplified version of the Swedish grammar and a richness of loanwords from the languages the speakers' parents or grandparents originated in: mainly Turkish, with traces of Kurdish, Arabic, Greek, Farsi, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, and to some extent Latin American Spanish.

Especially among younger speakers, the different varieties show a considerable variation in vocabulary and to some extent in grammar and syntax. They all share, however, some grammatical similarities, such as discarding the V2 word order of Standard Swedish, instead using Subject-Verb-Object word order after an adverb or adverbial phrase (as in English, compare Idag jag tog bussen ("Today I took the bus") to Standard Swedish Idag tog jag bussen).

Quite recently several novels written in a literary imitation of Rinkeby Swedish have been published in Sweden; Ett öga rött by Jonas Hassen Khemiri and Kalla det vad fan du vill by Marjaneh Bakhtiari.

External links

• Language and language use among young people in multilingual urban settings - a research project at Gothenburg University