Hur varierar Vasasvenskan? En undersökning av Vasabors perception av språklig variation kontrasterad mot deras språkliga produktion

The aim of the study is to discuss non-linguists’ perceptions of the variation in spokenVaasa Swedish and to compare their views with earlier results from an analysis of thelinguistic production by the same informants (Rabb 2014). The perceptions of tenwomen and ten men born 1936–1997 in the town Vaasa in Finland were investigated.The theoretical and methodological framework for the study are inspired by work insociolinguistics and perceptual dialectology.

The perceptions seem to correspond well with the results from the informants’production results. According to the informants, the Vaasa Swedish spoken amongolder people differ depending on social class combined with regional aspects of thespeaker. The Vaasa Swedish spoken by younger people functions as a linguisticresource to express toughness or closeness to one’s conversation partner. Consequent-ly, social class and neighbourhood are perceived to have less importance for youngerspeakers. The informants consider younger males to be more inclined to use VaasaSwedish than females. All these perceptions supplement and correspond well with theresults in Rabb 2014. Hence, the study of perception and the study of productioncomplement each other and this combined methodology, therefore, needs to be testedfurther in future studies. The study also shows that the views of modern socio-linguistics, where language variation is seen as a result of active linguistic choices bythe speakers, may reflect the views of the speakers themselves.