The dissertation deals with the Överkalix dialect in three respects. Överkalix is the northernmost community of the country where Swedish dialect is spoken. It is surrounded on the east and the north by Finnish, and on the west by Finnish and Saami.

The first section of the thesis is based on a questionnaire survey among all junior high school students (14-16 years old) in Överkalix and among their parents. It discusses the present-day position of the Överkalix dialect and the attitudes of the people of Överkalix toward the dialect. The results indicate that the people who consider themselves to be speakers of the local dialect have access to two language codes: local dialect and standard Swedish. Personal relationship is the deciding factor in language code choice. None of the parents considers himself/herself to be dialectally monolingual: 11% speak only standard Swedish, 75% keep the varieties apart and are thus bidialectal.

77% of the dialect-speaking students and 69% of those who do not speak dialect have a positive attitude toward the dialect, boys to a greater extent than girls among the dialect-speaking, and girls to a greater extent than boys among non-dialect speakers.

The second section examines interference from the surrounding languages, Finnish and Saami, in the Överkalix dialect in general and in the Överkalix dialect of multilingual informantsin particular. These informants speak standard Swedish, dialect, Finnish and/or Saami. The main data of this section originates from recorded interviews performed as informal conversations.

The author discusses some characteristic phonetic features in the dialect which seem to be the result of influence from Saami and/or Finnish. The material also shows a number of influences on the syntactic level.

The third section describes how the genitive is expressed in the dialect of Överkalix. The author gives several examples of how the -s genitive is paraphrased—most commonly with a prepostion.