“Ja, för jag tror att something’s afoot”. A study of generational differences in English code-mixing on Swedish National Radio.

Abstract

This study aims to investigate Swedish/English code-mixing across different Swedish generations, in an attempt to discover language change in progress. The spoken corpus has been extracted from two Swedish National Radio FM stations, where 214 codemixing examples have been transcribed from a total 540 minutes of spontaneous conversation. The code-mixing examples have been categorised as per type and function and analysed by using sociolinguistic theoretical models. The apparent-time hypothesis has been the theme throughout this age-based study and has been used to analyse language change. Speaker’s rationality in their linguistic choice, i.e. function, has been analysed in line with the markedness model (Myers-Scotton 1993a). The results show that there is an ongoing linguistic change in Sweden, where young males and females are favouring informal types and functions of code-mixing. The results suggest that Sweden is experiencing a new trend in terms of language change, where females no longer are sole leaders.