Onko suomen ja ruotsin koodinvaihdolla kielioppia? Substantiivien ja verbien taivutus Haaparannan, Tukholman ja Helsingin kaksikielisissä keskusteluissa

Abstract

Is there grammar in code-switching between Finnish and Swedish? Nouns and verbs in Finnish/Swedish code-switching 

he aim of the present study is to research bilingual Finnish-Swedish and Swedish-Finnish adolescents’ code-switching in Haparanda, Stockholm and Helsinki. In this article the main focus of the investigation is on the integration of embedded nouns and verbs in intrasentential code-switching from the point of view of grammar. The article investigates whether the code-switching is governed by Finnish or Swedish grammar, and how Swedish words are integrated into Finnish syntax and vice versa. 

he theoretical framework is found in the field of code-switching research and grammatical aspects of language alternation. A central interest of researchers on code-switching grammar is the grammatical constraints on where codeswitching can occur in a sentence and where it is not possible because of violatig the syntactic structure. The present analysis of code-switched sentences is also concerned with Poplack’s equivalence constraint, which predicts that code- switches will tend to occur at points where the juxtaposition of elements from the two languages does not violate a syntactic rule of either language. 

he primary data was collected in 2014–2016 among bilingual adolescents at three junior high schools in Haparanda. The secondary data was collected in 2014 at a Swedish junior high school in Helsinki and in 2015–2016 at two Swedish-Finnish junior high school in Stockholm. The data consists of video- and audio-recorded group and pair conversations. All the recordings were made outside lesson times. The analysis of the collected conversation data is qualitative. 

The results of this investigation show that code-switching between Finnish and Swedish is mainly governed by Finnish grammar and Finnish is used in the different noun cases, regardless of the matrix language. Embedded Swedish nouns adopt Finnish inflectional endings in code-switching in Haparanda and Stockholm. However, there are also some exceptions, especially in the conversational data from Stockholm, where the nouns also can be in the bas form or follow Swedish syntax.