Abstract This paper investigates the address avoidance of second person personal pronouns in Swedish in terms of language universals and the relationship between deviation from a universal linguistic feature and social structural change. The hypothesis proposed is that if a language universal exists, and if a language possesses this universal language feature but under specific conditions systematically avoids this feature with circumscriptions, then this particular language usage contains clues to the socio‐cultural‐economic conditions in that social structure.The language universal examined is Hockett's “Among the deictic elements of every human language is one that denotes the speaker and one that denotes the addressee.” Eleven ways of expressing “What do you want?” in Swedish, only two of which denote the addressee, are examined and the contextual conditions which tend to elicit the various forms are discussed. The assumption given to account for this address avoidance is that it reflects a stage of development from the non‐reciprocal power semantic to the solidarity semantic in the terms of the Brown and Gilman study “Pronouns of Power and Solidarity”; that it reflects the dichotomy between a still highly stratified community in terms of social class and the social democratic ideology of equality which has been the dominant political ideology since 1932.
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