Bryter finlandssvenskarna när de talar finska?

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate if fluently bilingual Finland-Swedish speakers have an accent in their Finnish, and whether this possible accent can be heard by native Finnish listeners. Furthermore, the aim was to investigate what acoustical features characterize a possible accent in the Finnish spoken by Finland-Swedish speakers. To answer these questions two studies were carried out: a listening test with 55 native Finnish listeners who were asked to categorize 20 speakers as native or nonnative speakers of Finnish, and if the speakers were regarded as non-native, how strong the speaker’s accent was: weak, moderate, or strong. The 20 speakers included native Finnish informants (4), Finland-Swedish speakers with Swedish as their L1 (15), and one speaker with Greek as his L1. The results of the listening test show that the Finland-Swedish speaker group is heterogeneous: roughly one-third of the speakers were categorized as native speakers of Finnish, another third of the speakers caused problems for the listeners as the speakers were almost equally often classified as 1) native speaker of Finnish or 2) a speaker with a weak accent. The last third of the speakers was by an overwhelming majority of listeners categorized as non-native Finns. The acoustical analysis shows that the most significant non-Finnish features were shortening of phonologically long syllables in unstressed position, and relatively short rhythmic phrases.