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- Title
Idiolectal Variation in Helsinki Urban Speech.
- Authors
Paunonen, Heikki
- Abstract
The article investigates how a linguistic pattern of alternation affecting the entire speech community is realized in individual idiolects making use of one example representative of colloquial Helsinki speech (CHS). In linguistic change it is thus possible to distinguish two phases: the phase of linguistic innovation and the phase of social spread. Twenty-four native-born Helsinkians were interviewed. The topic of conversation was customs and traditions of Helsinki with the goal being to get as spontaneous a sampling of speech as possible. In CHS the vowel combinations ending a/ä of non-initial syllables appear either in their original forms or as monophthongized long vowels. The degree of monophthongization varies according to vowel group. Investigation as to idiolect has demonstrated that the overall structure of variation is composed of several substructures of which each speaker participates in one. Sound change thus led to morphological restructuring and change in the morphological rules. The heterogeneous nature of the group containing partitive forms in ia and iä provides an answer to the question of why the monophthongization percentages for the combinations (ia) and ua) differ from one another.
- Subjects
HELSINKI (Finland); FINLAND; SOCIOLINGUISTICS; COLLOQUIAL language; SPEECH; LINGUISTIC change; MONOPHTHONGIZATION; IDIOLECT
- Publication
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1976, Vol 1976, Issue 10, p125
- ISSN
0165-2516
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/ijsl.1976.10.125