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

Abstract

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