“Sluta skämta om vårt språk” – Multilingual Suburban Swedish in TV-series Snabba Cash Abstract

In the early 2000s, literature produced by the new generations of Swedes with migratory backgrounds brought significant innovation to the country’s cultural scene. One of the defining features of this body of work is the presence of multilingual strategies used to deconstruct and renegotiate traditional parameters of Swedish identity within a society increasingly shaped by the presence of migration. More recently, the topic of migration has also gained increasing attention in other media, such as TV shows. Notably, the characters of the crime show Snabba cash exhibit systematic and pervasive multilingualism, blending Swedish with different languages. However, the ways such multilingualism is represented risk reinforcing binary, xenophobic and ethnic-based stereotypes rather than challenging them. The aim of this paper is to analyze the slang used in Snabba cash and identify the elements that may contribute to the reinforcement of such categorizations.