Double diglossia – lower class writing in 19^th-century Finland

Abstract

This paper analyses a number of typical features of lower-class writing in 19 th -century Finland. The data consists of business letters written by local traders and farmers. These letters are compared to letters by Forest Finns, a group of early Finnish migrants to Scandinavia. The business letters are marked by three distinct influences: the older literary tradition, local dialects and the 'rising literary genres' of the 19 th century.On the basis of the morpho-phonological level of the corpus texts, it will be argued that the lower-class writers intended to write a standard language, not a dialect.

Ego-documents in a historical-sociolinguistic perspective

“…is ties in with what Martineau in her contribution refers to as the hybridity of ego-documents, and with the concept of an intended standard, referring to writers' recognition of and convergence to supraregional writing practices (see e.g. Mihm 1998;Vandenbussche 2002;Nordlund 2007;Rutten & Van der Wal 2011). While all contributors to the present volume depart from the assumption that ego-documents are as close to speech as possible, all of them also question this assumption in one way or another.…”

Epistolary formulae and writing experience in Dutch letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

“…It is all too telling that many letter collections in historical sociolinguistics only exist because the writers were forced to write letters in the absence of their loved ones, because of emigration or war (cf. Elspaß 2005;Dossena 2007;Nordlund 2007;Sandersen 2007, as well as our corpus, see Section 4.1), or because they wrote petitions to overseers or authorities, asking for relief (cf. Klenk 1997;Fairman 2007).…”

White Field, black seeds: Nordic literacy practices in the long nineteenth century

“…e Forest Finns' ancestors had moved from eastern Finland to central Scandinavia in the 16th and 17th centuries and had lived for a long time isolated from Finnish culture. ere were naturally Swedish loan words in these 19th century letters, but also consistently eastern Finnish and even more extensive features of spoken vernaculars, which were o en presented in the letters with phonetic spelling (Nordlund 2007, Laitinen & Nordlund 2008 Paavo Räisänen is letter by a Forest Finn called Paavo Räisänen has in its date (line 8) the same kind of de nite article as the preceding letter: sinä 22. p: Novemb kuussa 1821 ("the 22th day in November 1821"). On the other hand, there are many phonetic features of Savolax dialect that can be taken as indicators of the membership of the writers in their own community.…”