ABSTRACT

From the mid 1980s, the impact of the ‘Don’t Forget Swedish!’ doctrine (Hyltenstam, 1986), to be followed by ‘Do Forget the Home Language!’ in the 1990s (Nauclér, 1997), was noticeable in the press. Articles warned against too much emphasis on the mother-tongue of minority children. I had by then met other Finnish parents who were eager to discuss family bilingualism and who found it exceedingly difficult to fight negative attitudes in their surroundings. The Stockholm linguist Ulla-Britt Kotsinas was launching her theory of rinkebysvenska (‘Rinkeby Swedish’), a grammatically simplified youth variety of Swedish spoken in the Stockholm suburb Rinkeby with a large immigrant population. This variety, sprinkled with foreign borrowings, was, according to Kotsinas, establishing itself as a new dialect of Swedish. Despite her statements that rinkebysvenska was by no means a language to be feared, many parents now experienced that they were warned against bilingual upbringing of their children ‘lest the children learn rinkebysvenska’ A group of us decided to found an association for parents in biand multilingual families.3 Sympathy and support from other parents were needed in many such families and the association was soon busy organizing meetings and information campaigns about bilingualism.