Finnish-Estonian Codeswitching in Interaction

This study investigates codeswitching by Finns who live in Estonia. It draws from spoken and written interactional data where mainly Finnish is used, but where the participants also employ their Estonian resources. The articles in the study focus on a selection of grammatical and discourse-related phenomena, namely the formation of compound nouns, codeswitching in reported speech, conversational sequence closings, and the functions of codeswitching in social media. The introductory article provides a general overview of codeswitching in the data: patterns of forming bilingual constructions, their emergence in the flow of conversation and their consequences in interaction. The theoretical framework of the study comes from the field of interactional linguistics, drawing from conversation analysis as well as construction grammar and contact linguistics. The data consist of ca. 900 cases of Finnish-Estonian codeswitching in audio- and videorecorded conversations, email messages, and writings in social media, which were all collected in 2002-2012 from Finns who had lived in Estonia for up to 17 years at the time of recording. An internet-based survey and the researcher’s field notes gave additional sociolinguistic background data. The data show that Estonian lexical forms and meanings are employed in Finnish contexts, that the case assignment of phrasal and clausal constructions may be mixed, and that th