Letter-writing as a communicative practice - polyphony in Finnish emigrant letters in the 19th century

• Authors: Taru Nordlund
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

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.

Keywords

EN

correspondence; polyphony; voice; from below; 19th century

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 49
• Pages: 381-398

Dates

published

2013

received

2013-02-19

revised

2013-08-14

accepted

2013-08-16

Contributors

author

Taru Nordlund

• University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2013-0014