Ska det vara de, dem eller dom? : En studie om mellanstadieelevers användning av de, dem, dom i det svenska skriftspråket

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to examine if pupils in the grades 4 - 6 in one school follow Swedish written language norms. The focus on this study is on the Swedish pronouns de, dem and dom. The English equivalent of de and dem is they and them. In the Swedish language we also have the pronoun dom, that is mostly used in colloquial language. This is interesting because its known that pupils today struggle with differentiating de, dem and dom in the Swedish written language. For example, many pupils use colloquial language dom in written language. There is also an ongoing debate about this topic, which I will go more into later in this study. The reason this research is relevant, is because the last time pupils in middle school years 4 - 6 was examined was in the in the 70’s and as I said there is an ongoing debate about the Swedish pronouns de/dem/dom. One of the things that the debate is about, is whether de and dem should be replaced with the colloquial language form dom. The two questions I used to come to a conclusion are: • What pronoun functions do the pupils have difficulties with? (object, subject etc.) • Does the position of the pronoun in the sentence have an impact on what form the pupils use? (does dem/dem här and dom/dom här occur before or after the verb). To answer these questions, I use two cloze procedures. One from Hallencreutz (1980) and the second one is from Håkansson & Norrby (2003). A total of 66 pupils did the cloze procedures. It was 22 pupils from grades 4, 5 and 6 that engaged in this study. The results show that (46 %) of the pupils used the colloquial language dom in the test. When it comes to pronoun functions, a majority of the pupils (59%) failed on the object function. The results also show that the pupils in my study mixed wrong use of dem/dem här and dom/dom här. Sometimes it was used before the verb, and sometimes after the verb. There was no clear pattern that dem/dem här and dom/dom här came after or before the verb, although it is said that dem/dem här and dom/dom här should appear more often after the verb.