The thesis explores bilingual adolescents’ language use, linguistic resources, and language practices in interaction at three junior high schools in Haparanda, a Swedish town on the country’s northeastern border with Finland. A comparison is also made with interaction among bilingual adolescents at two Sweden-Finnish junior high schools in Stockholm and at one Swedish-speaking junior high school in Helsinki. The aim of the study is to increase our knowledge of bilingual adolescents’ interaction practices and language repertoires, i.e. translanguaging, in interaction. The primary data consists of close to eleven hours of video- and audio-recorded informal group and pair conversations. The data was collected in 2014–2015 among 14–15-year-old bilingual adolescents at three junior high schools in Haparanda. The first set of material for comparison, comprising six hours of bilingual 13–15-year-old adolescents’ informal conversations, was collected in 2014 at a Swedish junior high school in Helsinki. The second set consists of 8 hours of video- and audio-recorded group conversations among 13–15-year-old bilingual adolescents in two Sweden-Finnish high schools in Stockholm in 2015–2016. Each of the conversations lasted for between fifteen minutes and one and a half hours. The theoretical framework is found in the field of translanguaging, which aims to describe bilingual language use and interactional practices (including code-switching), rather than focusing on the languages themselves. In translanguaging, research on interaction has the multilingual speaker, not the monolingual individual, as the norm. The analysis of the conversation data collected is mainly qualitative. The qualitative analysis of the bilingual adolescents’ conversations in Haparanda reveals patterns in their use of linguistic resources and translanguaging practices in interaction. The interlocutors fluidly and flexibly make use of their language resources, including grammar, morphology, syntax and language practices in their interaction. Not only are Standard Swedish and Finnish used in the negotiation processes, but also Meänkieli, local dialects, youth slang, and English. They translanguage in order to make sense beyond the resources of any one particular language. Examined from the viewpoint of translanguaging, similar patterns could be found in Haparanda, Stockholm and Helsinki, but there were also differences: in the recordings from Haparanda, Finnish was the matrix language, i.e. the base language in eleven of the fourteen conversations, but the bilingual adolescents frequently switched from Finnish to Swedish. In the conversational data collected in Helsinki in 2014, the relationship between the languages in the conversations was the reverse. In all the seven conversations from Helsinki the interlocutors generally used Swedish as the matrix language and they switched from Swedish to Finnish. In Stockholm, the interlocutors used more Swedish than Finnish and they switched more between languages if they used Finnish as the matrix language. Their language use seems to be more influenced by Swedish than adolescents’ language use in Haparanda. It can be assumed that sociolinguistic factors, like the different language settings, have an impact on adolescents’ language use in Haparanda, Stockholm and Helsinki. ...

youth language translanguaging negotiation of meaning language resources matrix language language repertoire language contact hybrid language use code-switching Swedish Finnish Keskustelunanalyysi viestintä sosiolingvistiikka kaksikielisyys koodinvaihto ruotsin kieli suomen kieli kielellinen vuorovaikutus kielikontaktit kielenkäyttö nuoret koululaiset Haaparanta Tukholma Suomi Ruotsi Helsinki