Translanguaging Practices in Bilingual Adolescents’ Conversations in Haparanda, Stockholm and Helsinki

• Published in: Nordiques
• Main Author: Kolu, Jaana
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Association Norden 2018
• Subjects: linguistique; bilinguisme; suédois; finnois; adolescent; linguistics; bilingualism; Swedish; Finnish; translanguaging; lang; litt; Haparanda; Northern Sweden
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.4000/nordiques.1016; http://journals.openedition.org/nordiques/1016

This study examines the functions of translanguaging, i.e. the use of multiple linguistic resources in informal conversations among bilingual adolescents in three different sociolinguistic settings Haparanda, Stockholm and Helsinki. The focus is on bilingual young people’s language in Haparanda, a Swedish town on the country’s northeastern border with Finland. The language use of bilingual young people in Haparanda has rarely been studied, although there has been a Finnish-speaking population in northern Sweden for hundreds of years. The theoretical framework is found in the field of translanguaging, which explores bilingual language use and interactional practices rather than focuses on the languages themselves. The primary data from Haparanda (2014-2017) consists of close to twenty hours of video- and audio-recorded informal group and pair conversations. The data from Stockholm (2015-2016) and Helsinki (2014) was collected for comparison. The analysis of the collected data is qualitative. Similar patterns could be found in these three cities, but the language settings impact on adolescents’ translanguaging. The study shows that speakers fluently and flexibly make use of their language resources for different communicative purposes, e.g. clarifications, quoting, referring to culturespecific items, expressing feelings and playing with languages. Not only are Standard Swedish and Finnish used in conversations, but so too are English, Meänkieli1, local dialectal features, youth slang and other language resources. Cet article se propose de décrire et de comparer les pratiques langagières d’adolescents bilingues suédois-finnois originaires de Haparanda, Stockholm et Helsinki dans trois situations sociolinguistiques différentes entre 2014 et 2017. Nous analysons ces pratiques par le biais du « translanguaging », un courant théorique qui se définit comme l’utilisation simultanée de ressources linguistiques diverses en situation informelle. Une approche translangagière présente l’avantage d’explorer l’utilisation et ...