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Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII: Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019
Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen
[Studies in Language Variation 25] 2021
► pp. 181–208

Chapter 8
Benim

A new pronoun in Swedish

ORCID logo | Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University
A new first-person pronoun has emerged in the vernacular of Stockholm Swedish. A loan from Turkish, benim is indexically self-aggrandizing and a feature of the male genderlect of Stockholm’s racialized proletariat. It is also typologically unusual by virtue of being a loanword in an abstract functional role, namely, a pronoun. I detail several factors that, in concert, allowed benim to enter into Swedish first as a naked prototype, then as a reanalysis of dissociative third-person constructions, and finally, as a productive first-person personal pronoun. I conclude further that the actuation of these factors was the unique social ecology of class and racial exclusion, which are generally known to drive symbolic status-moves among the subordinated.
Keywords: contact linguistics, constructionalization, grammaticalization, multiethnolects, pronouns, Rinkeby Swedish, Stockholm Swedish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Stockholm: Europe’s first-documented multiethnolect
    • 1.2Slang and symbolic distinction
  • 2.Research aims
  • 3.Data: A corpus of Stockholmian hip hop
  • 4.Syntactic use of benim
  • 5.Socio-indexical pragmatics of benim
  • 6.Social profile of benim users
    • 6.1Ethnic and national heritage
    • 6.2Social class
    • 6.3Gender
  • 7.The evolution of benim : A hypothesis
    • 7.1The Turkish use of benim and its dominance in the feature pool
    • 7.2Left dislocation in the Nordic languages
    • 7.3 Benim as a left-dislocated noun in an illeist construction
    • 7.4Grammatical constructionalization of ‘benim han e’ to ‘benim’
    • 7.5Summarizing the proposed evolutionary trajectory of ‘benim’
  • 8. Benim in historical context
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.25.08you
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Discography
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Young, Nathan J.
2022. The Sociolectal and Stylistic Variability of Rhythm in Stockholm. Language and Speech 65:4 ► pp. 1034 ff. DOI logo

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