Address and Interpersonal Relationships in Finland-Swedish and Sweden-Swedish Service Encounters

Abstract

<p> The chapter investigates address practices in 318 audio- and video-recorded service encounters at theatre box offices and other booking venues equally distributed across the two national varieties of Swedish, Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish. The results demonstrate compelling variation in address choices, which can be linked to participant roles (customer-staff), generation (below and above 50 years) and national variety. Overall informal address with T (du) is the most common address form in both varieties and is particularly salient among older customers in Sweden. There are few occurrences of V address in the data, and most are found among younger Finland-Swedish staff.</p>