Making the Threatening Other Laughable: Ambiguous Performances of Urban Vernaculars in Swedish Media
Making the threatening Other laughable: Ambiguous performances of urban vernaculars in Swedish media See also: Jonsson, Rickard, Franzén, Anna & Milani, Tommaso M. (2020). Making the threatening other laughable: Ambiguousperformances of urban vernaculars in Swedish media, Language & Communication, 71, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.11.001 Introduction Youth speech styles in multilingual settings have been the object of a large body of sociolinguistic inquiry since the early 1980s (see Hewitt, 1982, 1986; Kotsinas, 1988; see also Cheshire et al., 2011; Kern and Selting, 2011; Madsen, Karrebæk and Møller, 2015; Nortier and Svendsen, 2015; Quist and Svendsen, 2010; Wiese, 2012). Rampton (2011, 2015) has recently suggested the umbrella term ‘contemporary urban vernaculars’ to label these linguistic phenomena in a way that transcends age and ethnicity. After all, contemporary urban vernaculars are not only employed by young people (see in particular Rampton, 2015; Eliaso Magnusson and Stroud, 2012), nor are they spoken by ethnic minorities alone (Årman, 2018). In the Swedish context, the term ‘ortensvenska’ (‘Suburban Swedish’) has been used to refer to these linguistic phenomena. Here the Swedish word orten literally means ‘suburb’ and carries the social class connotation of the American ‘project’ or the British ‘estate’. Another well spread label of the same style, ‘Rinkeby Swedish’ (Rinkebysvenska), also refers to an urban periphery: the multiethnic and socioeconomically disadvantaged Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby. Most importantly for the purpose of this article, ‘Rinkeby’ Swedish has been turned by media discourses into an ‘icon’ (Irvine and Gal, 2000) of ethnic otherness, associated with an aggressively sexist and homophobic masculinity (Author 1, 2007; Author 1 and Author 3, 2009; Author 3, 2010; Author 3 and Author 1, 2012: Stroud, 2004, see also Cornips, Jaspers and Rooij, 2015 for a discussion on labelling of styles).
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