| Abstract [eng] |
Questions about both non-suffixed Lithuanian female surnames and the Swedish gender-neutral pronoun “hen” are becoming socially important in modern society. It is a phenomenon where with the help of linguistic resources a person does not communicate certain socially important information about himself to the public. For example, in the case of a non-suffixed Lithuanian female surnames, the marital status of a woman may be hidden from society and in the case of the Swedish surname “hen”, the gender of the person may not be indicated. In 2003, The State Commission of the Lithuanian Language has made a decision to legalize the non-suffixed Lithuanian surnames of a married woman and let her choose a surname with the suffix -ė instead of (i)uvienė (VLKK-N1). In 2015, the pronoun “hen” was included to the Swedish Academy’s dictionary (Lindqvist, Bäck, Sendén, 2018: 3). However, the fact that these modern ways of naming a person have been acccepted by the authorities does not mean that it can be accepted by the public. The aim is to investigate the evaluation of innovative, institution-accepted ways of naming a person in Lithuania (non-suffixed female surnames) and Sweden (pronoun “hen”) and to discover opinion trends and patterns in Lithuanian and Swedish “Facebook” communities “Nuotakų namučiai”, “Nuotakų namučiai 2022-2023”,“Årskurs F–3 Tips och idéer (endast för pedagoger och studenter)“, “Ledarskap – Gruppen för kvinnor”. The most important task is to explore how people seek to position themselves as members of the community and what narratives lie behind their positioning. A virtual ethnographic method was used for the research. In Lithuanian groups, a neutral question was asked to community members about non-suffixed Lithuanian surnames. In Swedish groups, a neutral question was asked to community members about Swedish pronoun “hen”. The research includes year 2021–2022. The results of the study revealed that narratives of anonymity and association with the LGBT community were the most common in Swedish communities. In Lithuanian virtual communities, the narrative of the aesthetics of the surname was the most common. The following tendencies are observed in both Lithuanian and Swedish virtual communities: the majority of commentators assessed these modern ways of naming a person positively, a smaller part - neutrally and only the smallest part of community members assessed it negatively. |
