Troping on prejudice
Stylised “bad Finnish” performances and reflexivity among adolescents in Eastern Helsinki
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15348173 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Heini Lehtonen (0000-0002-8726-0352, University of Helsinki, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Pages | 15-47 |
| Publication date | 2016-12-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | AILA Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1461-0213 • E-ISSN: 1570-5595 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/aila.29.02leh |
| OpenAlex | W2580300320 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 26 |
This paper studies reflexivity in interaction among adolescents in Helsinki in the light of stylised performances that are labelled by participants as “bad Finnish”. Stylised “bad Finnish” can be seen as an enregistered discourse register. It is an emblem in which certain linguistic features are connected to ideas about certain kinds of people and their characteristics. In particular, stylised “bad Finnish” is an indexical for social personae associated with “immigrants”, “foreigners” and non-native Finnish. The participants in this study came to Finland as children and learned Finnish as a second (or third or fourth) language, and they still have to face the excluding attitudes of the society. With their stylised performances and in their reactions to them, the participants position themselves with regard to the social personae indexed by stylised “bad Finnish” , their stereotypical characteristics and the wider societal discourses that touch upon themselves. Stylised “bad Finnish” is sometimes used for expressing distance from stereotypical immigrants, but sometimes for displaying solidarity with those who share the experiences of immigration and learning Finnish. Although it also works as a trope, seemingly detached from ethnicity, in interaction with native Finns it may still be delicate because of its pejorative social indexical potential
Ethnic group · Immigration · Indexicality · Linguistics · Pejorative · Political science · Politics · Prejudice (legal term · Sociology · Solidarity · Trope (literature · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Psychology · Social Psychology
The Dialogic Imagination
The Handbook of Language and Globalization
New Ethnicities and Language Use
Stance
Style
The Sociolinguistics of Globalization
Responding in Conversation
Language in Late Modernity
Lectures on Conversation
Crossing
Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life
How Listeners Use Facial Expression to Shift the Emotional Stance of the Speaker’s Utterance
Sociolinguistic Patterns
Language and Social Relations
Positioning
Sociolinguistic Aspects of Foreigner Talk
Language and the nation-state
Rethinking Context
Discourse Strategies
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.4 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2025 (10) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |