Hur används de, dem och dom i nutida skriftspråk? En storskalig korpusundersökning av nyheter och sociala medier

Abstract

This study ties in with a longstanding debate on the Swedish spelling variants de, dem and dom for personal pronouns (third person plural) and definite articles (plural). It charts the usage of de, dem and dom in five large corpora with news and social media texts over the past 25 years. The corpora contain more than 1.5 billion tokens, which rules out manual handling of the data. Instead, this study makes use of computational methods (including an AI language model) to automatically identify and classify relevant observations. Analysis of the news corpora shows a relatively stable usage of de, dem and dom over the past 25 years. The forms de and dem are predominantly used according to the norm: de for pronouns in subject position and as a definite article; dem for pronouns in object position. The colloquial form dom is hardly found in news texts. Analysis of the social media corpora shows more variation and change. The colloquial form dom is used in 5–25% of all instances instead of de or dem and has decreased after an initial rise. The forms de and dem are sometimes used in a non-standard way: de occurs in object position in 4–10% of the observations; dem is found in subject position or as a definite article in 1–7% of the cases. Non-standard dem is potentially on the rise with younger writers. The corpus analysis also provides details on the usage of de and dem in relative clauses, and on the users’ ratings of posts containing de, dem and dom on the social media platform Reddit.