“Chiamalo come diavolo vuoi” – l’affermazione della lingua degli immigrati nella letteratura svedese contemporanea

During the last decade, a new generation of writers with foreign background have appeared in Swedish Literature. The major feature of their works is the use of invandrarsvenska, the “immigrant Swedish”, a language widely outspread in the suburbs of Stockholm, Malmö and Göteborg. As scholars have pointed out, this “dialect” can be regarded both as an interim language spoken by immigrants unable to express themselves in fluent Swedish, or as a sociolect used by second generation immigrants, who deliberately speak with broken Swedish. After a brief outlook of the history of immigration in Sweden, the analysis concentrate on two short stories by Alejandro Lleiva Wenger and on the novel Ett öga rött by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, where immigrant Swedish is primarily used as slang. The last part is devoted to Khemiri’s second novel Montecore, and to Marjaneh Bakhtiari’s Kalla det vad fan du vill, where the writers describe the situation of their family in the suburbs of Stockholm and Malmö, giving special attention to the interim language spoken by their parents. This new generation has opened the way to a new urban realism, both linguistic and social, and has given us a critical portrait of contemporary Sweden.