Rinkeby Swedish () is any of a number of

varieties Variety may refer to: Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats * Variety (radio) * Variety show, in theater and television Films * ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont * ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

spoken mainly in urban districts with a high proportion of immigrant residents which emerged as a linguistic phenomenon in the 1980s.

Rinkeby Rinkeby () is a stadsdel, district in the Rinkeby-Kista borough, Stockholm, Sweden. Rinkeby had 19,349 inhabitants in 2016. The neighbourhood was part of the Million Programme. The Stockholm metro station Rinkeby metro station, Rinkeby was also o ...

in Stockholm is one such suburb, but the term Rinkeby Swedish may sometimes be used for similar varieties in other Swedish cities as well. A similar term is ''Rosengårdssvenska'' ("Rosengård Swedish") after the district

Rosengård Rosengård (literally "Rose Manor") was a city district ( sv, stadsdel) in the center of Malmö Municipality, Sweden. On 1 July 2013, it was merged with Husie, forming Öster. In 2012, Rosengård had a population of 23,563 of the municipality' ...

Malmö Malmö (, ; da, Malmø ) is the largest city in the Swedish county (län) of Scania (Skåne). It is the third-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm and Gothenburg, and the sixth-largest city in the Nordic region, with a municipal pop ...

. The one magazine in Sweden published in these varieties, Gringo, proposes 'miljonsvenska' ("Million Swedish") based on the

Million Programme The Million Programme ( sv, Miljonprogrammet) was an ambitious public housing program implemented in Sweden between 1965 and 1974 by the governing Swedish Social Democratic Party to ensure the availability of affordable, high quality housing t ...

. Different varieties of Rinkeby Swedish exist which are based on the regional dialects, especially in the major urban centers of Stockholm (Svealand dialects), Malmö ( Scanian) and Gothenburg (western Götaland dialects).

Classification

Opinions among linguists differ on whether to regard Rinkeby Swedish as a

sociolect In sociolinguistics, a sociolect is a form of language ( non-standard dialect, restricted register) or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, an age group, or other social group. Sociolects involve both passive acqui ...

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...

ethnolect An ethnolect is generally defined as a language variety that mark speakers as members of ethnic groups who originally used another language or distinctive variety. According to another definition, an ethnolect is any speech variety (language, diale ...

, or maybe a "multiethnolect". Since the number of influencing languages involved is rather large, and extremely few speakers are likely to be fluent in more than a few of these, the definition of

pidgin language A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

may appear more accurate than that of

mixed language A mixed language is a language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. It differs from a creole or pidgin language in that, whereas creoles/pidgin ...

. The varieties may also be characterized as a

register Register or registration may refer to: Arts entertainment, and media Music * Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc. * ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller * Registration (organ), th ...

for informal communication between peers, since the speakers often use them only in specific social contexts and switch to other varieties where appropriate.

Use

Professor Ulla-Britt Kotsinas, a scholar frequently cited on Rinkeby Swedish, argues that these varieties primarily are spoken by teenagers from suburbs where immigrants and immigrant descendants are concentrated, and can be interpreted as expressions of

youth culture Youth culture refers to the societal norms of children, adolescents, and young adults. Specifically, it comprises the processes and symbolic systems that are shared by the youth and are distinct from those of adults in the community. An emphasi ...

: The language is a marker of belonging to a certain subculture and at the same time opposition to a perceived mainstream non-immigrant culture that seems not to value the immigrant descendants. Rinkeby Swedish and similar varieties thus express belonging to the rather large group of youths with roots in other countries that have grown up in immigrant neighborhoods in a

post-industrial society In sociology, the post-industrial society is the stage of society's development when the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy. The term was originated by Alain Touraine and is closely related to si ...

and with a disproportionately high

unemployment Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the refere ...

rate for youths with immigrant background. Except for the fact that the

linguistic distance Linguistic distance is how different one language or dialect is from another. Although they lack a uniform approach to quantifying linguistic distance between languages, practitioners of linguistics use the concept in a variety of linguistic situat ...

is greater, Kotsinas sees in principle no difference from the suburban and urban working class varieties that followed

industrial revolution The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...

and

urbanization Urbanization (or urbanisation) refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. It is predominantly t ...

a century ago. Many words from Rinkeby Swedish have now been incorporated into all kinds of other Swedish youth

slang Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-g ...

and are used by many young people without immigrant heritage as a marker of group solidarity and identity.Ellen Bijvoet and Kari Frauru
"Svenska med något utländskt"
''Språkvård'' 2006/3 pp. 4-10, p. 5 (pdf)

Distinctive traits

Variants of Rinkeby Swedish are reported from suburbs of Stockholm, Uppsala,

, and Gothenburg with a predominantly immigrant population. These variants tend to be based on the local town accents, or on the variety of

Standard Swedish Standard Swedish () denotes Swedish as a spoken and written standard language. While Swedish as a written language is uniform and standardized, the spoken standard may vary considerably from region to region. Several prestige dialects have devel ...

taught in school. These varieties can be described as having a somewhat simplified version of the Swedish grammar and a richness of loanwords from the languages of the countries the speakers' parents or grandparents originated in: mainly Turkish language, Turkish, with traces of Kurdish language, Kurdish, Arabic language, Arabic, Greek language, Greek, Persian language, Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Syriac language, Syriac, and to some extent Latin American Spanish language, Spanish. Many English language, English words and some English grammar are also used, due to a fairly widespread identification with African Americans and the appreciation of rap and hip hop music and culture. Especially among younger speakers, the different varieties show a considerable variation in vocabulary and to some extent in grammar and syntax. However, they all share some grammar, grammatical similarities, such as discarding the V2 word order, Verb-second word order of Standard Swedish, instead using subject–verb–object word order after an adverb or adverbial phrase (as in English language, English, compare ''Idag jag tog bussen'' ("Today I took the bus") to Standard Swedish ''Idag tog jag bussen'' ("Today took I the bus").''

Sample vocabulary

Literary use

Novels written partially or completely in Rinkeby Swedish include *''Till vår ära'' by Alejandro Leiva Wenger; ("To our honour") *''Ett öga rött'' by Jonas Hassen Khemiri; ("One eye red") *''Shoo Bre'' by Douglas Foley *''Kalla det vad fan du vill'' by Marjaneh Bakhtiari. ("Call it whatever the hell you want")

References

External links

Language and language use among young people in multilingual urban settings
a research project at Gothenburg University {{Swedish language Swedish dialects Swedish hip hop