“Gruß aus Saksa”: Multilingual practices in a German expatriate online community in Finland

Abstract

<p> <span>This article investigates forms and functions of multilingual </span><span>practices among German-speaking expatriates in Finland in an online </span><span>community. It focuses on Finnish codeswitches in otherwise German </span><span>forum messages in a material that consists of 179 discussion threads </span><span>with a total of 616 Finnish codeswitches. The structural analysis of the </span><span>Finnish codeswitches revealed that most of the Finnish codeswitches </span><span>were intrasentential switches – most often common and proper nouns. </span><span>Switches of other parts of speech such as verbs and adjectives occurred </span><span>significantly less often. Almost half of the Finnish nouns were orthograph</span><span>-</span><span>ically adapted into German through capitalisation of the initial letter. </span><span>The functional analysis showed that codeswitches referring to Finnish </span><span>culture and society were common. Other central functions included </span><span>metalinguistic commentary, slips of the tongue, greetings and closings, </span><span>reported speech, and reiteration. The forum members largely relied on </span><span>their shared knowledge of Finnish and Finland, and only some code-</span><span>switches were translated into German. The findings of this study indi</span><span>-</span><span>cate that these Finnish codeswitches are an expression of the multicul</span><span>-</span><span>tural and multilingual lives and identities of the forum members. </span><span>Codeswitching to Finnish serves both as a means of communicating </span><span>their shared Finnish experience and as a signal of membership in the </span><span>online community.</span> <br></p>