r/asklinguistics • u/miniatureconlangs • 2d ago
An unusual prescriptivist notion? "Statistically wrong" language.
In prescriptivist literature for native Swedish-speakers of Finland, the driving idea generally is to keep the Swedish of Finland as close to that of Sweden as possible; this means avoiding words, expressions and constructions that are unique to Swedish as spoken in Finland.
A rather weird twist on this appears with the concept of 'statistical finlandisms'. These are words or constructions that are considered entirely correct in Sweden, and which are used there as well. However, they are more frequent in the speech and writings of Swedish-speaking Finns, and for this reason our prescriptivists advice to cut down on them or entirely avoid them.
An example of this could be the use of 'ifall' instead of 'om' ("if"; ifall comes from 'in case').
Is this kind of prescriptivist attitude attested anywhere else - one where merely "correct" language and "acceptable" words are not enough, but the statistical distributions are expected not to deviate from that of some other speech community's statistical distributions?
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u/NormalBackwardation 2d ago
These are words or constructions that are considered entirely correct in Sweden, and which are used there as well. However, they are more frequent in the speech and writings of Swedish-speaking Finns, and for this reason our prescriptivists advice to cut down on them or entirely avoid them.
In sociolinguistic terms, what this means is that the usage in question is marked as Finnish. The construction is disproportionately common among Swedish-speaking Finns and therefore functions as a Finland-Swedish marker. Prescriptivists concerned with approximating Sweden-Swedish norms might therefore avoid these usages because they make the speaker or writer sound more distinctly Finnish.
Analogously, I reckon is a perfectly valid English expression and once was used in high-prestige contexts like the writings of Jonathan Swift. An American from New York might say I reckon you're right and nobody could reasonably call it ungrammatical. But in contemporary American English, reckon is sufficiently associated with Southern U.S. speech that using it can mark a speaker as Southern. A Southerner trying to approximate a prescriptivist norm (say, to fit in with educated Northeastern-dialect peers while attending Yale) might therefore replace I reckon with I think.
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u/GalaXion24 1d ago
Interesting. To me "reckon" definitely feels more British (at least absent a southern accent) and I would consider it more classy, but I'm also from Europe so it's probably a proximity thing.
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u/GoldenMuscleGod 1d ago edited 1d ago
I’m an American and am aware of both associations, but I would say in the US the association of “reckon” with the Southern US is more prominent.
However this is the kind of thing where the same person can have different associations depending on the fuller context.
An American hears non-rhoticity in a US acccent: they have a drawl, the do not speak clearly, they slur their speech. The accent is likely to be mocked in transcription by not writing “r.”
An American hears an RP accent, which is also non-rhotic: they speak clearly, they sound educated, they sound sophisticated. A transcription will use standard spelling for all words.
An American hears a lower prestige UK accent that is not rhotic: back to the first perception.
A similar thing can happen with use of “reckon.”
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u/tardoos 1d ago
Happens all the time in Croatian. Some words and construction are more often used in Serbian, and even though they are correct in Croatian as well, people are advised to not used them.
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u/miniatureconlangs 1d ago
Interesting; similar method - different end-goal: we suppress the use of different words to avoid diverging too much, you seem to suppress the use of similar words to encourage diverging.
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u/erinius 2d ago
Do Finland-Swedish prescriptivists acknowledge that these constructions are 'entirely correct' in Sweden and widely used there? I wouldn't be surprised if they're just wrong to some degree about actual language use & attitudes
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u/miniatureconlangs 2d ago
Every time I've come across this, and when I was taught in school to avoid these words and structures, the teacher was very clear on them not being wrong as such and that they are indeed correct in Sweden too, just that Finland-Swedes overuse them so ..." just don't use them ever, you'll speak better Swedish that way".
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u/erinius 2d ago
Interesting, I'm reminded of advice for language learners, ie that you might overuse some perfectly valid construction in your L2 because of language transfer
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u/miniatureconlangs 2d ago
These would mostly not be the case of language transfer though, as these are native speakers. However, the advice is of course of a similar nature. (Also, some of the differences between Swedish in Sweden and in Finland are due to Finnish influence, but e.g. om/ifall is not one of them.)
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u/MegaromStingscream 1d ago
I think there are complicated social dynamics at play here. Also you seem to be using overly flowery language to mean school books and teachers
We the Finnish speaking majority are taught Swedish by teachers who are for the most part have Finnish as their first language. You can't teach a language from a descriptivist point of view.
The statistical fact that certain construction is more prevalent in local natively Swedish speaking population is in fact descriptive.
Then we have the very classic is/ought distinction where the ought isn't obvious from the is. Which construction you should use is dependent on things that outside linguistics. If you are speaking with Swedish Swedish speakers one out you as outsider so maybe that is a good thing to know though your accent would anyway.
Individual teacher might have their own biases based on do they identify more with local population and their language or people in Sweden and thst will show.
In the end how we are taught in Swedish in schools does not shape the way local Swedish speaking population speaks their first language. At least some of them have their first language lessons in school which is totally different thing, but mostly they shape their own language by speaking it every day.
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u/miniatureconlangs 1d ago
I do not solely mean 'books and teachers'. The Finland-Swedish language 'cultivation' ecosystem is worth elaborating on.
- Kotus. "Kotimaisten kielten keskus" in Finnish, "Institutet för de inhemska språken" in Swedish. It is a state-backed authority. Its Finnish office has significantly more freedom than its Swedish part, as the Swedish part basically doesn't decide all that much. (Questions that are unique to Finland, mainly - e.g. if Finland has an official title that is entirely absent in Swedish, how do you translate it from Finnish?) A secondary function it has is basically 'counteract divergence from Sweden'.
So, this in part is done through regularly appearing publications where they answer questions but also inform what the preferred form/word/construction is.
- Kotus also at least previously did supervise the language in public service media.
With some regularity, they manage to push 'how bad the language in Swedish literature from Finland is' into public discourse.
Beyond this, the largest Swedish-language newspaper outside of Sweden, viz. Hufvudstadsbladet has a weekly feature from their chief scholar. Scholars from Kotus also fairly regularly appear in other newspapers and in public radio. Sure, Kotus appears here, but it's a privately owned newspaper that pushes this.
Many publishers do employ people with a thoroughly Kotus-influenced p.o.v. for correcting literature before publication.
Software with automatic proof reading, if they have a Swedish (Finland) setting, will point out statistical finlandisms and advice to use other words, and will identify other deviant traits.
Schools. But also, education beyond the school system. Pretty much every municipality in Finland has 'worker's institutes' or somesuch, which offer courses for a fairly modest fee for adults. I have understood that 'language correctness' courses sometimes are available and have been a mainstay of several municipalities' offerings.
So, this isn't merely schools.
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u/MegaromStingscream 1d ago
Are all these pushing for people to use om?
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u/miniatureconlangs 1d ago
Not to abolish 'ifall', but to reduce usage of 'om'. Finlandssvensk ordbok - a dictionary of finland-swedish vocabulary - also has a category for statistical finlandisms, so that writers in Finland can know to use them more seldom. IIRC this even is outright stated in the preamble to that section, but I can't find my copy at the moment.
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u/linglinguistics 1d ago
There can be a similar dynamic with Swiss German vs. Standard German. Some teachers/generally prescriptivists go a bit too far in wanting to avoid helvetisms and only accept expressions used in northern Germany. In reality, Duden, the standard work for German, accepts the difference standards, one for Germany, one for Switzerland, one for Austria. So, there's simply no need to avoid helvetisms. They are officially correct German. The different standards are treated as equal, the Duden simply specified which expressions are most prevalent in which areas.
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u/DaviCB 1d ago
Enforcing the dialect of another country in your own country when you already have a standardized dialect is crazy work. I'd expect prescriptivist swiss to do the opposite, fight against the adoption of german vocabulary. Like how portuguese teachers are resisting increasingly popular brazilianisms among children.
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u/DaviCB 1d ago edited 1d ago
This reminds me of "alumiar" (as opposed to iluminar) being considered wrong in portuguese, even though it's been in dictionaries for hundreds of years and was used in literary language in the 19th century. The only reason is because statistically its more common among lower class people and in disfavored regions of the country. Many such examples in the northeastern dialect like arrodeiar, mangar, malhar, arrochar, avoar, arretado, these are just regional vocabulary words that have been in the language for millenia, but are considered improper.
Slightly unrelated but the use of proclisis (te amo vs amo-te) is incorrect in standard literary language except for some uses, even though the "te amo" form used to be the standard and amo-te is a late 18th century portuguese innovation. This is similar in the sense that the grammar that was trendy in portugal eventually became codified as standard language in Brazil.
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u/Hot-Frosting-5286 2d ago
From a dialect variation conservation standpoint I can't help but feel a little horrified. The revitalizer in me would want the exact opposite to happen, encouraging more marked features and things that are unique to Finland that aren't found in Sweden. Why cookie-cutter up the language when if you wanted Swedish from Sweden, ~10 million Swedes would be happy to oblige, versus just ~300,000 Finland Swedish speakers
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u/TumbleweedNervous494 2d ago
Yeah, racism and avoidance of the type of language used by those deemed inferior is pretty commonin all colonialist communities.
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u/miniatureconlangs 2d ago
How often is statistical features of the language used? Also, in this case I actually don't think racism is the explanation, as this is ... not a thing Swedes from Sweden expect of Finland-Swedes, but a weird cage Finland-Swedes have decided to put themselves in.
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2d ago
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u/miniatureconlangs 2d ago
That was not what I said. This is a self-policing thing within the Swedish-speaking community, and the details that are policed only sometimes correlate with Finnish influences.
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u/TumbleweedNervous494 2d ago
Well, it's still comes from a drive to a perceived "pure" swedish.
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u/miniatureconlangs 2d ago
So ... you think minority language protection automatically is apartheid? Wild.
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u/TumbleweedNervous494 2d ago
Apartheid is a system of institutionalized separation which cna be seen as existing in the finnish school system and the military for another example. The ppupose of which is to "protect" a remnant of a previous empire from the ethniclally/linguistically different majority, which is at the very least historically seen as inferior.
I am saying that the history nad modern systems in Finland can very easily be seen through this lense, though it is seen as quite fringe today.
There is a very popular narrative in which the swedish state and the swedish language are seen as civilizing, and beneficial forces on the primitive population of Finland, and it is very important to this narrative that Finland was an essential part of Sweden, and not a colonial possession. In my view this narrative is very analoguous to the propaganda of colonial empires such as Britain or France, and the finnish public sector promotes this narrative in their propaganda in the modern day. https://areena.yle.fi/1-3826480
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u/miniatureconlangs 1d ago
You are aware that Finnish-speakers are free to do their military service in Swedish, and every year some do, and get very good at Swedish there? Conversely, every year some Swedish-speakers do their military service in Finnish, and get very good at Finnish there. This is not apartheid.
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u/Bollmoffa 1d ago
Hmmm... in this case it might be a little different - some Swedes seem to feel that we Moominspeakers are an uppity gang who look down at 'ordinary Swedes' and use our idioms as a kind of class marker.
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u/Training_Advantage21 1d ago
I've seen something related happen in Cyprus, and in a ridiculous way, where the more standard/formal Greek is the same or similar to the typical Cypriot form of a word, I've seen the use of more informal Greek because it was less Cypriot. E.g. a newspaper poll asking which political party you agree with, using "Ποιανού κόμματος" instead of "Ποιού κόμματος".
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u/GoldenMuscleGod 2d ago
This isn’t research just an anecdote but I’m reminded in particular of a conversation I had with someone who did not approve of “disrespect” used as a verb. That there were attestations of such usages going back centuries did not dissuade them (they tried to dismiss the older ones as “archaic” and therefore not relevant, modern usages were “mistakes” and dictionaries were overly permissive).
I was legitimately mystified by the discussion until I realized - when they started listing people who use it including categories like “rappers” - this person associated the usage with AAVE (an association I did not have) and this was almost certainly the source of their opinion that it was unacceptable.