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The linguistic idiosyncrasy as Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s identity in his novel

  • Journal of the Scandinavian Society of Korea
  • Abbr : JSSK
  • 2012, (13), pp.1-34
  • Publisher : The Scandinavian Society of Korea
  • Research Area : Social Science > Area Studies > North Europe(Scandinavian)

Jai Ung Hong 1

1한국외국어대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this essay was to identify the anarchic linguistic idiosyncrasies that occur in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore - a unique tiger. Montecore – a unique tiger is not only funny, ambitious and inventive but Khemiri's wordplay and deliberately odd narrative clearly offers also a serious commentary on Swedish society. Khemiri gives us questions of culture and language, racism and violence, metafiction and postmodernity, formal conceit and constraint. Jonas Hassen Khemiri, the son of a Tunisian father and Swedish mother, was raised in the vicinity of Rinkeby. ‘Rinkeby Swedish(Rinkebysvenska)’ is any of a number of varieties of Swedish spoken mainly in suburbs with a high proportion of immigrants and immigrant descendants, which emerged as a linguistic phenomenon in the 1980s. ‘Rinkeby Swedish’ is used by urban toughs and middle-class youths eager for a little street credibility. Rinkeby Swedish is regarded as a sociolect, dialect, ethnolect, or maybe a "multiethnolect". Khemiri’s novel, Montecore narrates the life-story of the Jonas’ immigrant father, Abbas Khemiri in Rinkeby Swedish which is full of playful malapropisms, missing words and broken syntax. This study aims to the level of linguistic performance in Khemiri’s novel and analyse Khemiri’s linguistic creativity that amuse the reader.

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