Flerspråkighet i språkbruk och språkinlärning i Finland i ett historiskt perspektiv

Multilingualism in language use and language learning in Finland from a historical perspective In this paper multilingualism and multilingual language use in Finland is discussed from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. A central theme is what happens in multilingual meetings between people. Multilingualism is also treated from the point of how conversations contribute to language learning and increased competence in a language. The data consist of examples from administrative and private texts such as letters and diaries. The languages explored are mainly Swedish and Finnish, and Low German and Russian to some extent. In Finland, Swedish and Finnish have been spoken during historical times in different areas and by different classes. There have also been bilingual communities since medieval times, but the interaction at least in the 18th century has mostly been of receptive art (Kuvaja et al 2007). In the studied texts, multilingualism is manifested as receptive multilingualism in medieval letters in Low German and Swedish (cf. Braunmüller 2007). Productive multilingualism is attested as code-switching from medieval texts to 19th century. The reasons for code-switching can be found in the genre and function of the texts, such as naming medieval boundary lines in Swedish and Finnish according to what was practical. In private texts, code-switching has been used for example in reported speech to distance oneself from the recipient or to show the turning-point in a narrative (cf. Franceschini 1998 and Gumperz 1982). The examples also show a move from communities of practice where two languages are spoken and acquired towards bilingual communities in the 19th century (cf Saari 1993 and Wenger 1998).