The Institute of Language and Folklore
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Namn och namnbärare : Om könsneutrala, könskonträra och könsöverskridande namn
No full textNames and Name-Bearers: On Unisex and Gender Inconsistent Names In many cultures, one of the more important properties of a name is that a first name should indicate the bearer’s sex. This is even compulsory in some countries. Until a few years ago in Sweden, children and adults were not allowed to have first names traditionally borne by the opposite sex (genderinconsistent names). Some political parties and interest groups (e.g. LGBTQ-groups)6 regarded this attitude as discriminatory and have worked against it. After a court decision in 2009, the Swedish Tax Agency (where decisions on first names are taken) no longer regards genderinconsistent names as inappropriate for either adults or children. Gender-neutral or unisex names have, however, been in use for a long time. In the first major part of this paper I examine, through the results of three attitude surveys whether this new and more liberal view has any popular support among the Swedish people, i.e. whether people consider it okay to give boys’ names to girls and vice versa. All three surveys show that a majority of the respondents are against giving gender-inconsistent names to babies but that the attitude towards adults adopting such names is more allowing. In the second part of the paper, the results from an empirical study on the current use of unisex and genderinconsistent names for babies are discussed. My findings confirm earlier American studies showing that more unisex names have a background as male names than female names, that they are often without a long tradition in the country, and that many of them are short forms or pet forms stemming from different names, both male and female. However, my findings differ from those in the American studies in that most of the names used for children of both sexes are rather uncommon in Sweden.
Från ”invandrad” till ”internationell” och ”interkulturell” slöjd : En exposé över begreppsbildningen inom Hemslöjden
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Interpersonal relationships in medical consultations : Comparing Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish address practices
No full textThis article investigates how interpersonal relationships are expressed in medical consultations. In particular, we focus on how modes of address are used in the two national varieties of Swedish: Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish, with the aim to compare the pragmatic routines in the two varieties. Thus the study contributes to the field of variational pragmatics, where national varieties of pluricentric languages are recognised as important research objects. Address practices are analysed in two comparable corpora of video recordings from Sweden and Finland using both a quantitative and a qualitative CA-inspired method. There are several differences between the data sets: the Sweden Swedish data are characterised by exclusive use of the informal T pronoun (du ‘you’) and an overall higher frequency of direct address compared to the Finland Swedish data. In some medical consultations in the latter Swedish data the formal V pronoun (ni) is used. The qualitative analysis confirms these differences and the tendency is that the Sweden-Swedish medical consultations are more informal than the Finland-Swedish ones, which are characterised by more formality and maintenance of social distance between the interlocutors. The different pragmatic orientations at the micro level of communication can also be related to socio-cultural preferences at the macro level in society – the development towards greater informality and intimate language is more pronounced in Sweden than in Finland. Interaktion och variation i pluricentriska språk IVI
Address and Interpersonal Relationships in Finland–Swedish and Sweden–Swedish Service Encounters
No full textThe chapter investigates address practices in 318 audio and video recorded service encounters at theatre box offices and other booking venues equally distributed across the two national varieties of Swedish, Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish. The results demonstrate compelling variation in address choices, which can be linked to participant roles (customer–staff), generation (below and above 50 years) and national variety. Overall informal address with T (du) is the most common address form in both varieties, and is particularly salient among older customers in Sweden. There are few occurrences of V address in the data, and most are found among younger Finland-Swedish staff.Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages (IVIP
