sa wulfs wrote:Wow, I assumed it was less heavily coded than that and now I realize that calling it "standard" puhekieli was a stretch despite the heavy lifting that the quotation marks were doing.
Well, standard would require some kind of standardisation, which has never been done to spoken forms of Finnish.
It is quite difficult to get rid of everything that makes your speech regional when there isn't a standard form with rules that you could study. It also isn't something most people would want to do 24/7. Like
Osmo Ikola has written in Kielikello (a journal of linguistics) in 1986:
Osmo Ikola wrote:Luulen, että yleispuhekielemme nykyään on epäyhtenäisempää, enemmän variaatioita sallivaa kuin vuosisadan alkukymmeninä. Suomen kielen statusta ei ole enää tarvinnut mainitulla tavalla pönkittää. Ja muutenkin tyyli on muuttunut, elämänmeno on monessa suhteessa tullut vapaammaksi, rennommaksi. Monissa sellaisissa tilanteissa, joissa ennen usein pyrittiin käyttämään huoliteltua kieltä, likipitäen yleiskieltä, sellainen tuntuisi nykyään kankealta ja teennäiseltä, joskus jopa naurettavalta.
Puhuessamme yleispuhekielestä täytyy tietenkin aina pitää mielessä, että eri kielimuotojen väliset rajat ovat liukuvat. Useimmat yksilöt käyttävät puhuessaan erilaisissa tilanteissa erilaisia rekistereitä. Sivistyneet, oppikoulun käyneet mutta monet muutkin, pystyvät tarvittaessa yleensä käyttelemään yleiskieltä tai yleispuhekielen eri asteita. Toisaalta he arkisissa oloissa useimmiten käyttävät jotakin alueellis-sosiaalista arkikieltä, lähikieltä, joka eroaa yleiskielestä milloin enemmän, milloin vähemmän.
(Short summary in English: yleispuhekieli or general (?) spoken Finnish has likely become more diverse and is likely to have more variation than Finnish spoken in the early 1900s, since back then people were more concerned of the status of Finnish and its appearance as a "real language" that can be used in science etc. Moreover, the contexts where Finnish is used have become more relaxed, and the kind of careful language that could even be close to standard Finnish would feel too stiff and formal, even ridiculous. Ikola also writes that it is important to keep in mind that the different forms of language exist in a continuum. People can and do use different levels of yleispuhekieli, sometimes they can use standard Finnish, and most often in their everyday lives, they'll be using the local puhekieli.)I don't know the book you are reading, but I'd assume the speaker you quoted would be talking to people they know - that is, speaking in a context where a local puhekieli would be common.
The other, younger character I quoted doesn't talk like this, for example she has the standard dipthongs, but she still said viäl at least once. In my head I saw this as a sign that the traditional Turku dialect is in the process of being replaced by a more uniform puhekieli that still has local characteristics but that is closer to the kind of speech you'd usually hear on TV. Would that be accurate?
Yes and no. People have been worried since, what, the 1960s? that Finnish dialects would be dying out and eventually be replaced by some kind of spoken Finnish. Because of this, lots of linguists ran to record the "authentic dialects", preferaby spoken by old men who were thought to have preserved them the best, before they would be lost forever. That's where you get all these very interesting records that you can now listen to online, such as
Taavi Rantanen (b. 1905, recorded 1972) and
Nikolai Reunanen (b. 1889, recorded 1966).
But as the decades passed, to everyone's surprise, the dialects didn't die out. It has been observed that they've levelled out a little because of TV, radio, and Internet, and lots of old words have been forgotten (mostly because they were about agriculture, and we have different technology for it now). Studies have also shown that people who do not feel strong connection to their home town or who have moved out of their home region are less likely to speak in dialect. (This is something I have also noticed myself. I don't speak in dialect in Tampere, and neither do my friends. However, when I asked them, they said they do use their dialects at home - just like I do. I'd say it's rather typical that you won't hear dialects in big [university] cities with lots of people who've come from different parts of Finland.) People who have a strong connection to their home town and/or who haven't moved out are more likely to have a dialect. The studies have also noticed women are more likely to use puhekieli than men. Also, people used to be ashamed of their dialects: speaking in them was a sign you hadn't moved to a bigger city to study, so you were uneducated and lived in a farm like a peasant, you know. Not cool. This attitude has changed recently (as in, during the last 20 years). Nowadays, you can see dialect in semi-formal contexts like local newspapers,
advertisements, even in
job advertisements (another example
here),
visit-the-city-X guides and other
"our city" type of ads, in different products (like
this rye bread brand that had 9 different dialects represented in their bags one year), the
Facebook post by the Finnish Tax Administration, and so on. You can also hear young people speak in their dialects in Youtube, such as
pahalapsi, or in local puhekieli, like
Sita Salminen (and her video quite well demonstrates that at least Oulu dialect is still commonly used, since she is listing things she has noticed while living in Oulu. That doesn't really show how teenagers speak, of course, but it's also not something that only very old people have.)
Speaking of age, there is this news article about a study made on Tampere dialect and change that
you can read here! To summarise, people's speech doesn't stay the same: as you age and as your life changes, your speech changes as well, and this change is not just from a dialect to more general speech but also from a more general speech style to a stronger dialect.
You might also find
this news article interesting. They interviewed Sanni Inget, who's 28 years old and makes videos on Instagram in Oulu dialect. If you click the recordings, you can also listen to her speaking in the dialect. Then there's this
article in Kielikello about using dialects in Youtube videos that seems like it'd be worth reading. It's quite a long text and I haven't read it yet myself, but I'll leave the link here just in case.
So, to summarise: people have been worried the dialects would disappear for the past 50 years or so, but it hasn't happened yet. Instead, they've become almost trendy during the last decades. At the same time, the way people speak has certainly changed because of Internet and TV. So what can we say about the status of Turku dialect? Not much, I think. It's too early to say what will happen. It could be that as a university city, the newcomers influence the way the locals speak. It is also possible that the locals become prouder of their dialect as a symbol of their roots and identity, and start using it even more than now. And it is also possible that teenagers do not speak in the dialect now, but as they age, they start using it more. We'd need to do a longitudinal study to be sure. (I can't answer how much the Turku dialect has changed by now, because this is not something I've really read about, so I don't know if there's e.g. studies made on it.)
On the face of it it looks like your dialect would be a bit easier to understand for an intermediate student with very little previous experience outside of kirjakieli.
Well, that was (local) puhekieli so I would expect it to look somewhat familiar to you.
It's true though that my dialect is one of the most conservative ones in Finland and it belongs to the Western Finnish dialects, which are both reasons why it is closer to standard Finnish than some other dialects might be. (Not the closest though - IMO the dialects spoken in Central Finland are even closer since that region is between Western and Eastern dialects, and standard Finnish is a mixture of Western and Eastern dialects.) If you'd like to test how much you could understand of my dialect, you can listen to it
here,
here and
here.