Svetlana Rönkkö ja Tove Hansson : vieraan aksentin performanssi mediahuumorin resurssina

Abstract

The paper deals with foreign accent performance in two popular comedy shows in Finnish television. Two different foreign accents of L2 Finnish – Russian and Swedish – were performed by two fictional characters: Svetlana Rönkkö, a Russian-born woman, and Tove Hansson, a Swedish speaking woman coming from the Åland Islands. Our main focus is on the empirical analysis of the phonetic features in these performances. The features are analysed as such, in relation to the empirically studied, “authentic”, features of L1 Russian and Swedish Finnishes. The performances are looked as folk linguistic (Nieldzielski & Preston 2003) analyses of the most prominent indexes of the social groups in focus, drawing on Silverstein’s (2003) notion of indexical order. Our observations suggest that the performed accents can be seen as clusters of phonetic, lexical, grammatical features but that they also involve embodied and artefactual references – all displayed by the actor’s performance. Finally, we argue that although many of the features may not be “genuine”, they combine to produce an accent that is recognizable, that results in joint laughter of the audience – and that is, therefore, sufficient and “enough”.