Varying social roles and networks on a family farm: Evidence from Swedish immigrant letters, 1880s to 1930s

1 Introduction

The present study examines the linguistic means through which Swedish immigrants convey their social roles and strive to maintain their networks in ego-documents, namely in letters written to family members in the home country. Ego-documents are personal texts, e.g. letters, diaries, and journals, which purportedly reflect not only spoken language (Elspaß 2012, Elspaß 2015); see also the other articles in this issue), but in the case of letters, likely the language forms used with family members. Scholars can read immigrant letters as ego-documents ^[1] that display a range of the writers’ social roles: (1) personae from their home of origin, such as daughter, sister, son-in-law, nephew, and childhood friend, and (2) personae in their adopted community, such as their roles as land- and homeowners, farmers, employers, neighbors, and parishioners. Our method of analyzing the idiolectal patterns of the writers resonates with a recent school of the study of individual authors and their discourse patterns (see Nurmi and Pahta 2010; Fitzmaurice 2010). Such a linguistic approach has yet to be applied to the correspondence of Swedish immigrants. By focusing on the idiolectal and discourse patterns in the letters of an immigrant family, we trace how the writers formulated their correspondence in response to their new socio-economic situation. Further, we scrutinize immigrant letters for evidence of how heritage language forms emerge in the correspondence.

The study of ego-documents has gained momentum over the past two decades likely with the advent of electronic correspondence corpora and the availability of other sources containing ego-documents (e.g. the Corpus of Early English Correspondence [Nevalainen et al. 1998]; the Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor collection [Auer et al. forthcoming]; Sokoll 2001; Fairman 2006, Fairman 2009). Further, historical sociolinguists have surveyed speech communities of various kinds. In immigrant communities, ego-documents played an important role in describing everyday life, allowing continued contacts with the homeland, where the tradition of receiving and reading aloud family letters was well-established (see; Persson 2005, Persson 2008, regarding the Swedish letter-writing culture). When the letter-writing tradition was transplanted to the United States in Swedish-American settlements, it took on a new resonance, stimulated by the American circumstances and social challenges. The contents of many family letters described the new conditions and social roles in letters to readers back in Sweden (Barton 1975; Attebery 2007).

Our investigation surveys patterns of language use and social roles of individuals in letters, written in Swedish and with some varying traces of English, by two Swedish immigrants in America: a husband (Nils Blomberg, 1839–1907), a wife (Mathilda Blomberg, 1863–1948), and their eldest child (Anton Blomberg, 1885–1956), to the wife’s close relatives in Sweden. The empirical foundation of the investigation is a set of 32 extant letters, most of them written by Mathilda, ^[2] sent from the Smoky Valley in Kansas over a period of nearly fifty years (1885–1934) to family members in the province of Östergötland, Sweden.

More specifically, our study explores how the individual letter writers express their social roles using a range of linguistic and discursive patterns across time (Hymes 1972, Hymes 1996; Gumperz 1982, Gumperz 2015 [2001]; Sherzer 1987; Elspaß 2012, Elspaß 2015). By social roles, we refer to ways “in which writers used their linguistic resources to position themselves in relation to their interlocutors in the texts” (Pahta et al. 2010: vii). ^[3] Our diachronic investigation is limited to examining some of the language patterns written in a rural, bilingual settlement of Swedes. Further, we circumscribe the scope of our study to the correspondence of three persons. ^[4] Yet by studying the letters and in turn surveying the number of individuals the writers mention in their letters over the years, we gain insights into how the writers were using the ego-documents. They were endeavoring to sustain their social networks in Sweden just as they were describing how their roles and networks were expanding in their adopted home in rural Kansas. We examine roles and networks as these entities exist in relationship with one another.

The Blomberg correspondents and their addressees were indeed separated by vast geographical space: the province of Östergötland is located in the southeast portion of Sweden (south of Stockholm), and Kansas is in the middle of the prairielands of the United States. Nils and Mathilda carried social roles from their home villages to their adopted community, but they also took on new roles as evidenced through their linguistic and discursive patterns, adjusting and adapting (Kroskrity 2000; Nurmi and Nevala 2010: 163, 165; Nurmi and Pahta 2010: 136; Turner et al. 2012 [1981]) to a new settlement in Kansas. When we use the phrase social roles, we observe that Nils and Mathilda actively created their identities in relation to others (Bucholtz and Hall 2005, 586, 607–608; Baert 2006: 525) who comprised the social networks revealed in the correspondence: the persons they mentioned and the persons in Sweden who would read the letters. The Blombergs’ eldest son, Anton, who was born and raised in Kansas and presumably never met his addressees in Sweden, can also be said to have taken on a role of transmitting interesting news from Kansas when he wrote to his Swedish relatives. It is our view that the writers regularly performed identities linguistically in their correspondence and that these identities can be perceived in discourse and to some extent in the lexis (Jacobs and Jucker 1995; see especially Haugen 1969 [1953]; Pavlenko 2004). As apparent below, we note that Mathilda self-consciously uses some heritage Swedish lexis in her letters, even though she herself was Swedish-born.

We organize our article as follows: after introducing the aims of our study, we present our research questions and describe our methodology. Section 3 provides biographical details on the three writers, illustrates the material with a sample of Mathilda’s correspondence, and shows how we apply the concept of ‘author roles’. Analysis of the correspondents’ letters appears in Section 4. In Section 5, we make systematic comparisons of the writers’ discourse in our discussion and concluding remarks.

2 Aims, research questions, and methods

The aim of our investigation is to identify the linguistic means by which three members of a family express their roles in the Swedish-American immigrant community. Our central research question is: how do the writers convey their social roles in the letters? One expects the social roles and networks to change over time across the lifespan, and we explore how, linguistically, such changes are perceptible. We aim to show, especially in the case of Mathilda, who corresponded to her parents and siblings for almost fifty years, that her self-value and “agent-centered view of performance” (DeHaan 2010: 124; see also Taavitsainen 2016) expanded over time. One obvious way that her identity was conveyed in writing is in her self-conscious use of Swedish lexis that diverges semantically from the Swedish of her parents and siblings. ^[5] We therefore find it important to place extra focus on the language patterns used by Mathilda, a woman whose letters included mention of at least 200 individuals living in the United States and in Sweden (see Sub-Section 4.2.3). With such an extensive social network of persons on both sides of the Atlantic, nearly all of whom spoke Swedish, we have reason to believe that Mathilda was particularly adept at noticing and commenting on linguistic patterns.

In view of the relatively small dataset to which we currently have access, that is, transcribed letters containing approximately 11,000 words, our methodology is mainly qualitative. It involves close reading of the letters, surveying the content of the correspondence, and noting where and, if so, the authors move between formulaic expressions and free-flowing text (Taavitsainen 2016; see also Barton 1975; Attebery 2007). In the data, we observe that Mathilda and Nils rarely use paragraph breaks to signal movement to a new topic. Further, punctuation between sentences is rare. Instead topics, akin to discourse ‘episodes’ (cf. van Dijk [see Dijk] 1981), are juxtaposed in the letters. ^[6] Despite the paucity of paragraph breaks and punctuation clues, it is, however, possible to note where a correspondent describes something (e.g. the interior of a church) and where the writer turns to instructing the recipients on what to do (e.g. in order to collect a package). In addition to stretches of text that are descriptive and instruct the readers about life in Kansas, we note that Mathilda and Nils use their correspondence to advise and bless their readers; quote family members and neighbors in Kansas; list items, report briefly on events, and even state when they sent packages to Sweden. As one important function of the letters we examine is to request that relatives in Sweden perform certain actions, we examine how the authors give instructions to achieve desired results. In doing so, we examine the expressions of agency that are the ones most open to inspection in letters. ^[7] Exemplification of the form of these various discourse functions is provided in Section 4 (cf. Mey 2001 [1993]: 117–124, on speech acts and speech act verbs; Bischoff and Jamy 2013: 2–6; Harder 2013: 72, on the functions of language approach).

Our close-reading approach mentioned above is also used to identify points in the letters where the correspondents use hybridized language forms (here defined as word-internal language contact phenomena; see, e.g. Extract 4, tigns), code-mixing (two languages used phrase-internally; see, e.g. Extract 11), and code-switching (longer stretches of text in which one language alternates with another; see Figure 3 and Extract 12), and where they add meta-commentary on their patterns of language use. Further, we read the letters with an eye to understanding the social context of the correspondence and identify the names of persons in the U.S., in Sweden, and those traveling back and forth between the countries, whom the writers mention. The names of such individuals provide clues about the social networks in Kansas whom the writers wanted to make relevant for their readers as well as the networks they recalled and endeavored to maintain in Sweden. We cannot rely upon such a list to provide a full picture of the Blombergs’ social contacts across time, but it does give us a sense of the social worlds the correspondents tried to unite in writing these ego-documents. We also assume that the writers varied their language, presumably so that the language forms communicating the contents would seem relevant to the readers.

Figure 1:

Extract from letter by Nils Blomberg to parents-in-law, January 3, 1885, page 4 (of 8).

Figure 2:

Letter by Anton Blomberg to uncle, 17 January 1902, page 2 (of 4).

Figure 3:

Postcard by Anton to maternal grandfather, 14 December 1907.

3 The authors, their letters, and their roles

In our analysis, we view the correspondence of the writers in terms of their expression as individuals, rather than as serving as the proxy for the entire Blomberg family farm. Accordingly, we devote a sub-section to each author below. We begin with Nils, the first person in the family to emigrate to the Smoky Valley of Kansas, the adopted home of thousands of other Swedish-born and Swedish-speaking persons (Nelson 1943; Carman 1962, Carman 1974; Karstadt 2003). We later turn to Mathilda, and finally to Anton, a member of the Kansas-born generation.

Nils Blomberg was born on December 26, 1839 in the parish of Gladhammar, Sweden. ^[8] He immigrated twice to the United States. The first time was in 1866, when he was 27 years old. By 1868, he was homesteading land southwest of Lindsborg, Kansas, living in an earthen dugout and working for a brief time as a laborer for a railroad company near the town of Ellsworth, Kansas. At some point (year unknown to us), he sold his land and returned to Sweden, where he married Clara Mathilda Ulriksson, 24 years his junior. Together, they immigrated to the U. S. in late November 1884, returning to the Lindsborg area, where two of his brothers and a maternal uncle also lived. Nils and Mathilda set up a temporary household in Lindsborg in December before they bought farmland near the village of Bridgeport, located seven miles north and east of Lindsborg. Blomberg continued farming until his death in 1907, when he was 68.

Clara Mathilda Ulriksson was born in 1863 in the village of Wårdslunda, Hycklinge parish, in the province of Östergötland, in Sweden. She was the daughter of Kristina Maria Lovisa Jakobsdotter and Ulrik Reinhold Fredriksson, who both remained in Sweden. As mentioned above, the couple married when Nils had returned to Sweden after his first sojourn to Kansas. Mathilda was 21 years old when the couple immigrated to Kansas. They established a farm and raised a large family; eight of their children survived to adulthood. Their eldest child, Anton, was born in 1885. Mathilda was 44 when Nils died in 1907. In 1913, she moved from the farm to a house in Lindsborg. According to her letters, the five youngest children—Hanna Sofia, Edward Alvin, Ellen Alvida, Vendla Olivia, and Stella Myrtle Maria—lived with her in Lindsborg while they completed their education at the local grade school, high school, and college. Meanwhile, the older children, Anton, Amanda, and Verner, had established their own households.

Mathilda remarried in 1922, when she was 59. Her second husband, Carl Gustaf Flöhr, was also Swedish-born. In a letter to her brother (1932) she explained that Carl was born in Uckna parish in Småland and had immigrated with his family to Kansas when he was twelve. Flöhr, like Mathilda’s first husband, had a network of family and friends living in Lindsborg and elsewhere in Kansas, according to letters she wrote to her siblings in Sweden. Mathilda’s correspondence provides strong evidence that Swedish was spoken in her Kansas home throughout her lifespan. For example, her letters occasionally include quotations of clever and amusing observations made by the children. She also quotes some of Carl Gustaf’s speech in Swedish (see Extract 5). ^[9] According to the biographical information about Mathilda available in Riksarkivet, she returned to Sweden for a visit in 1937. Mathilda died in Lindsborg in 1948.

Anton Blomberg, the eldest child, was born on March 23, 1885, a few months after his parents had settled in Kansas. Like his younger siblings, he attended the local schools with children of other Swedish immigrants. In fact, his early childhood corresponds to a time point when the highest number of Swedish-born persons resided in McPherson County, Kansas, according to the Census records (Hoffman and Kytö 2018). This demographic information, combined with the quoted speech recorded in Mathilda’s letters, gives good reason to believe that the Blomberg family had many opportunities to speak Swedish in their social networks (Karstadt 2003; cf. Wilkerson and Salmons 2008). The Swedish language was taught in a Lutheran-affiliated summer school (Bergin 1909, Bergin 1919), and as the Blombergs were members of Bethany Lutheran Church, it is very likely that the children would have attended Swedish lessons and would have used a series of Swedish-language readers that were published by the Chicago-based Engberg-Holmberg Publishing Company. ^[10]

We exemplify various roles expressed in the discourse of a letter in (1) below. ^[11] The letter, written in a variety of Swedish showing influence from contact with English, was penned by Mathilda, at the time aged 41, who had been living in Kansas for nearly two decades.

In a space of approximately twenty-five lines, Mathilda manages numerous topic shifts and communicative aims in maintaining connections to her parents and siblings (Attebery 2007: 14). Overall, the passage in (1) reveals how Mathilda introduces numerous episodes in a dense text, including, being instructive (telling her parents how to collect their Christmas money [page 2, line 5]), beneficent (page 2, line 14), and a reporter (describing the Kansas harvests and weather, page 2, lines 23–25; page 3, lines 1–4). These and other discourse episodes evident elsewhere in her letters help construct her role (cf. Pahta et al. 2010: 3) as an intermediary between Kansas and Wårdslunda. The various ways in which roles are conveyed via language and discursive patterns in Mathilda’s, her first husband’s, and their eldest son’s correspondence are developed further below.

4 Linguistic analysis of the correspondence

5 Discussion and concluding remarks

In this section, we discuss the patterns in the subject matter and language use in the letters with the aim to understand the social roles and networks perceptible in the correspondence written by the members of the Blomberg family. As we now know in detail how Mathilda structured her letters, we can point to the convergences/divergences from her letters and her role compared to Nils and to some extent compared to Anton.

Both Nils and Mathilda maintained their use of Swedish in the correspondence over time, even if they occasionally used some English words and English-influenced constructions. Anton, a childhood bilingual, provided dual forms for every line in the later piece of correspondence; see Figure 3, the postcard written to his maternal grandfather. Regular topics in the letters by all three family members were the agricultural conditions and markets in Kansas and the plants, crops, and livestock on the Blomberg family farm. To varying extents, the letter writers used lexis from English in communicating this information. Nils’ letters contained some English (farm, farmare [for ‘farmer’], bussel [for ‘bushel’] etc.). Anton wrote about kalkoner eller turkeys (Extract 11). Mathilda described plants that bloomed well into the late fall, mentioning over the years some dual names in Swedish for the plants: November blomer or vinter ecken (see Sub-Section 4.2.2.). Typically, she wrote the name of a plant, place, or profession in her variety of Swedish before explaining what the name would be in her family’s variety of Swedish. We identified some lexical evidence for this change as well as some of her occasional meta-commentary pertaining to her word choices in the letters (see Extract 9). In the later years in Mathilda’s correspondence, some evidence emerges that she expends slightly less energy in providing dual names for a concept; see Extract (10). One interpretation can be that she shows more confidence in her American Swedish lexis.

The social roles and networks of Nils and Mathilda can be traced over portions of their lives, thanks to some degree to the quantity of their letters. Even if the extant correspondence by Nils is limited to approximately a span of 12 years, it is possible to see that he maintains the role of the knowledgeable agri-businessman who keeps a close watch on the market values of the crops and livestock on the family farm. Further, his letters signal that he has plans for how and when travels and transactions should happen. He shows such agency, for example, when he instructs his brother-in-law Gottfrid on the best way to travel from Wårdslunda to the middle of Kansas (letters written in 1887 and 1888) and when he explains to his parents-in-law where they will receive packages he has sent with his nephew who is returning to Sweden. He thus builds bridges between the Swedish-American community in Lindsborg and the Swedish village of Wårdslunda. The persons he mentioned in the letters to his in-laws give strong indication that he was closely linked to Swedish-speaking social networks in rural Kansas (see 4.1). All of the individuals mentioned by Nils, with the possible exception of a doctor, were speakers of Swedish. His letters provide clear evidence that he was surrounded by the Swedish language in Kansas.

Diachronic analysis of Mathilda’s letters shows a correspondent whose roles were simultaneously “fixed” and “fluid and subtle” (Pahta et al. 2010: 2–3). In terms of Mathilda’s “fixed” roles, we find strong evidence that she was keen to maintain her familial roles as loving daughter and sibling, and as a childhood friend. In every letter of the correspondence spanning 49 years, Mathilda opens and closes the correspondence with extended warm and affectionate greetings and closings (cf. Attebery 2007). In nearly all cases, the greetings and closings are formulaic in that they were based on Bible verses her family in Sweden would have recognized (see Sub-Section 4.2.2).

Another way that she tries to maintain her role as a family member, friend, and acquaintance is by inquiring regularly about relatives, friends, and villagers back home. She urges them to write, frequently mentioning how long she has waited for a letter. For example, Mathilda writes to her parents: “var er syster Hulda nu […]/jag skref till/hene för ett år sedan men/sedan har jag ej hört något” (‛Where is sister Hulda now? […] I wrote to her a year ago but since I have not heard anything’, letter dated January 24, 1888, pages 1 and 2 [of 4]). Indeed, Mathilda’s complaints about not receiving letters in return demonstrate her wish to maintain her social networks in Sweden, despite the space and time that separated her from her relatives and friends. In letters she wrote when she was in her 60s and 70s, she reminds the readers of the number of years that she has been away from Sweden, and she entreats them to send greetings to anybody in the village who might remember her from childhood.

Mathilda expresses her wish to maintain her close relationships with friends and family in Sweden, and the same correspondence provides evidence of her role as an intermediary between Lindsborg and Wårdslunda. In time, however, her linguistic style subtly changes and gravitates toward a new identity as a Kansas Swede (cf. Blanck 1997) in her choice of Swedish lexis. Her adopted identity becomes visible when she comments on some semantic differences between the Swedish in Kansas and the Swedish back home. As she was one of thousands of Swedish-speaking persons of many different ages living in Kansas at the time (see, e.g. Nelson 1943), she witnessed the sociolinguistic processes that were turning Swedish into a heritage language (cf. Hasselmo 1974; Rothman 2009). Her meta-commentary on lexis provides some spectator views of how semantic differences were emerging.

Over many decades of writing letters, Mathilda brought her Kansas experience closer to the Swedish relatives. Meanwhile, her social roles and networks expanded perceptively over time. The contents of her letters give a strong indication of a woman with a large social network, over 200 persons with whom she had contact of varying regularity and strength. As was the case with Nils’ social networks that were perceptible in letters, Mathilda’s networks were also obviously dominated by Swedish-speaking persons.

Our study surveyed the meaning-making processes (Gumperz 1982: 38–99) and discourse (Hymes 1972: 65) visible in the correspondence of three letter writers as they preserved their roles as members of Mathilda’s family in Sweden. Mathilda also pointed out differences between the Swedish used in Kansas and the Swedish used by family members at home. Anton expressed his two roles, as an American and as Swedish, by writing lines in English and in Swedish. Thus, in the correspondence, we saw how the individuals balanced old and new language and discourse forms. In so doing, the writers display social roles that were achieved in written interaction on one family farm across time and space.