ABSTRACT
Sweden, once an emigration country, has become an immigration country during the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. By 2018, 24 per cent of the population was born either outside Sweden or in Sweden to parents born outside the country. What effects has this change had on variation in the country’s dominant majority language, Swedish, in the country’s major cities? Most researchers, since Kotsinas’s work in the 1980s, have assumed that one or more contact varieties have arisen in its major cities, while domestic Swedish dialects have undergone levelling, due in part to urbanisation. In this chapter we review previous research into the structure and significance of new contact varieties of Swedish in urban areas, which has mainly focused on salient lexical and morphosyntactic variables. We argue that the particular pattern of residential segregation in Sweden’s second largest city, Gothenburg, might play a role in explaining the complex patterns of language variation and dispersion of some less salient variables, the long vowels of Swedish, in that city, and by extension in other Swedish cities as well.
