Men and women in language change. A Swedish case study

Abstract

Continuity and change in present-day Swedish . Eskilstuna revisited is a study of language change in real time. It replicates an earlier investigation of the social variation of Swedish in the medium-sized town of Eskilstuna using data collected 29 years after the original study. In my article, I focus on the rate of change in relation to gender. I have studied seven morphological and morphophonological variables which are sociolinguistically marked, and according to general linguistic opinion in Sweden, in the process of fairly rapid change towards the standard forms of the written language. Our data show that the rate of change at the level of the community is low. Social and age differences have decreased, whereas gender differences have increased. I discuss different explanations for the fact that women in Eskilstuna use more standard language than men, and attempt to analyse why the men still use so many local variants.