Rinkebysvenska (Rinkeby Swedish) is a common term for varities of Swedish spoken mainly in suburbs with a high percentage of immigrants. Rinkeby in Stockholm is one such suburb, but Rinkebysvenska is sometimes used for similar varieties in other Swedish cities as well. Opinions among linguists differ on whether to regard Rinkebysvenska as an ethnolect , sociolect and/or dialect.

Variants particular to Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg suburbs with a large percentage of immigrants have developed. These variants tend to be based on the local variants of Standard Swedish, borrowing words from foreign languages; mainly Turkish, with traces of Kurdish, Arabic, Greek, Farsi, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, and to some extent Latin American Spanish. Especially among younger speakers, the different varieties show a considerable variation in vocabulary and to some extent in grammar and syntax. They all share, however, some grammatical similarities, such as discarding the V2 word order of Standard Swedish, instead using Subject-Verb-Object word order after an adverb or adverbial phrase (as in English, compare Idag jag tog bussen (Today I took the bus) to Standard Swedish Idag tog jag bussen).

Quite recently several novels written in a literary imitation of Rinkeby Swedish have been published in Sweden; Ett öga rött by Jonas Hassen Khemiri and Kalla det vad fan du vill by Marjaneh Bakhtiari.

The status of Rinkebysvenska can in some ways be compared to that of African American Vernacular English in the US.

External links

• Language and language use among young people in multilingual urban settings - a research project at Gothenburg University