Letter-writing as a communicative practice - polyphony in Finnish emigrant letters in the 19th century
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Taru Nordlund
Abstract
This paper discusses the correspondence between Finnish emigrants living in North America and their families and friends at home in Finland. This correspondence dates from the latter part of the nineteenth century, and concerns the first generation of emigrants. Sending and receiving letters in nineteenth-century Finland can be understood as a communicative practice of the local community, because letters were written collectively, and a literate person typically acted as a scribe in the community. Even reading and receiving a letter was a collective act of hearing. Linguistically, the collective nature of letter-writing is reflected in the different manifestations of polyphony in the texts. This article will focus on the polyphony of the immigrant correspondence, analysing who are allowed to have a voice of their own, and how the different voices are reconstructed in the letters. This analysis will focus particularly on conveying polyphony through the use of person marking in Finnish.
© Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 2013
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Thematic issue on historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics of migrant contexts
- Code-switching in the records of a Scottish brotherhood in early modern Poland-Lithuania
- German in Samoa: Historical traces of a colonial variety
- Lithuanian on both sides of the Atlantic: Toward the “intended” standard
- Letter-writing as a communicative practice - polyphony in Finnish emigrant letters in the 19th century
- British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1820-1821): Metatextual keywords vs. analytic categories
- A-prefixing in Civil War letters from Northwestern South Carolina: Constraints, individual and community grammars
