Jypp, Dompa och Jackson Pollock - Berättelser om plats, förortiska och överklass i ett innerstadsgymnasium

Abstract

Jypp, Dompa and Jackson Pollock: Narratives on place, urban vernaculars, and upper class at a prestigious upper secondary school. Labelling a linguistic style by appointing it to certain groups of speakers and where they live can be a deeply problematic enterprise as both identities, language use and space become fixed and limited. In Sweden the speech style called Rinkeby Swedish (RS) has become an icon of ethnic Otherness, educational failure, and of an aggressive sexist and homophobic masculinity – ascribed to a fixed locality in the outskirts of the big cities. In this paper we have turned our gaze towards a place that have typically not been associated with RS before: a Stockholm elite school. The analysis reveals how a group of students, illustrated by how the participant Wille, perform authenticity and indexically anchor their linguistic practices and epistemics in various linguistic contexts. In a case study, we explore how the participants talk about and use not one but many different linguistic styles. We argue that the participants employ these styles as resources to comment on locality as well as social hierarchies in the school and the society at large.

Keywords

• prestigious inner-city schools
• youth styles
• unexpected place
• linguistic ethnography
• narrative practices