Language use tends to awake public interest very easily. We have analysed here one instance of Finnish-English language mixing that turned out to be a subject of public discussion in Finland. Our focus is on an interview with Sara Chafak in the radio Suomipop in March 2016.
We have analysed code-switching in the 20-minute-long interview here in three levels. Firstly, we looked at its form; in what ways English is adapted into the Finnish conversation, and what kind of lexicon is used in English instead of Finnish. After that, we speculated the possible motives behind the speaker’s language mixing. English language is present in Finland in many ways, and especially the younger generations have very positive attitudes towards it. English is used as an additional resource on a daily basis within the young generation, very often as an additional stylistic device and as a tool for constructing social identity in conversation. Language mixing could be described as a part of modern youth slang in Finland. However, there are also people who feel English is a threat to Finnish language and culture, or that the two languages should at least be used separately and for communicative purposes. This might be one of the reasons why this event became so well-known afterwards. The third part of our paper looks at the consequences of the interview. The interview happened in good spirit, and the radio-channel, well-known for its humorous style, posted shorter videos of the interview in their web-page. One of those videos had collected most of the instances of code-switching that Chafak produced during the event, under a headline Sara Chafak spent three weeks in Hollywood – forgot Finnish language in Finnish. This particular shorter video was then reposted over 2000 times within the next 16 hours on people’s Facebook-pages. The discussion moved from one context to another, as the newspapers wrote about the event. There was also a reported who wrote on her blog defending Chafak, as the discussion was very critical towards Chafak. Finally, both Chafak and the reporter were invited to a TV-show one week later, where they discussed the situation and how they felt about it.
Julia Hentilä, Pauliina Kanervo and Johanna Kirstinä
English in Finland 