Gatekeepers talk about talk. Perceptions of migration-related language variation beyond learner language and suburban slang.

In Sweden, over the past decades, a large amount of research has been conducted on new urban youth styles, here called suburban slang, widely used by young people from culturally and linguistically heterogeneous suburban areas. More recently, some researchers have begun to focus on the way these young individuals speak in more formal situations, here called suburban Swedish – i.e. Swedish close to standard but with a suburban touch, due to, in particular, phonological features indexing suburb. Among the general public, these two ways of speaking are often lumped together under popular labels such as immigrant Swedish or Rinkeby Swedish. As a result, widespread negative attitudes towards the well-known suburban slang risk »rubbing off» on suburban Swedish. This may cause serious problems for the speakers, e.g. if this occurs in a job interview.

This danger of negative evaluation was investigated in a folk linguistic listener study on gatekeeper perceptions. Ten speech stimuli from young adult speakers (among which two samples each of suburban Swedish and suburban slang), were evaluated by 95 gatekeepers (employment officers, student counselors and teachers). A range of data types – quantitative as well as qualitative – was analyzed: attitude scales, variety labeling, assessments of the speakers' occupational level and linguistic background, and group discussion data. Results from the quantitative part of the study show that suburban sounding speech (slang as well as suburban Swedish) highly correlates with gatekeepers' low ratings of the speakers' occupational level. Moreover, the participating gatekeepers lack adequate terminology to differentiate between these two ways of speaking. The results of the study were discussed in focus groups with a subset of participants (i.e. talking about talk), aiming at raising the gatekeepers' sociolinguistic awareness.