Phonetic and lexical variation in Finland-Swedish

This research project is a sociolinguistic investigation into change and variation in Finland-Swedish, a Swedish variety spoken as a native language by 290,000 individuals in Finland. Whereas, in the past, Finnish and Swedish were largely spoken in different regions and communities, in the 21st century an increasing number of Finland-Swedes stem from bilingual Finnish- and Swedish-speaking homes and live
in communities where Finnish is the dominant language. Using data obtained from sociolinguistic interviews conducted with participants from four regions in Finland, the studies in this thesis explore the phonetic and lexical consequences of bilingualism becoming more common in the Finland-Swedish community.