Re: Nasality på svensk

Kou wrote:

> Now a tape I picked up in Japan on learning Swedish has
> a guy and a woman on it. The guy speaks normally, but the
> chick has, how shall I put this, a definite twang in her
> voice. I chocked it up to her individual pronunciation and
> as something I did not wish to imitate, and left it at that.
> But I was watching OP:7 on TV the other night (is everyone
> in Sweden that cute?
Yes we are. :)

> heck, even the shlubs on the show are good-looking), and a
> couple of the characters had the same kind of, for lack of
> a better term, tinny nasality.  I can't describe the
> phenomenon well, and I can't reproduce it, but natives, what
> is it that I'm noticing? A regionalism? Swedes with deviated
> septa or cleft palates? I mean "by" sounds like /by~~~~~/,
> fint like /fi~~~~nt/, etc.
That's got to be "Viby-i" and "Viby-y" named after the placename
Viby. The tongue is somewhat more retracted and it has a certain
consonantal "buzz". It's common in Göteborg/Gothenburg, some areas
in the middle of Sweden and on Lidingö. Here in Stockholm it's
actually more known as "Lidingö-i" than "Viby-i". The theory of
how it got spread to Lidingö (a snooty-ass island in Stockholm)
is that the kids took it from Gothenburg when they stayed there
during the summer.

And if I'm not mistaken, some of the actors in OP:7 are from
Gothenburg (or else they're from Lidingö).

To sum things up, don't put it in your speech. It's not standard,
though it might make you sound a bit göteborgsk. :)

I've heard it's not uncommon in other parts of the world
either. I can't give you any figures, but it definitely
exists elsewhere too.

||| daniel

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