Multiple roots of multilingualism: actors and factors affecting the linguistic landscape of cemeteries in an industrial town in Finland

Abstract This article is a methodological contribution to the question of what can be inferred from the linguistic landscape of a cemetery about the multilingual past of a community. The data of the study come from cemeteries in Varkaus, an industrial town in a Finnish-speaking area in Finland, where a small Swedish- and German-speaking minority formed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a result of industrial labor migration. The method selected for the analysis combines the perspectives of linguistic landscape research with onomastics and offers new insights into the possibilities and limitations of cemeteries to function as a source of evidence for the investigation of historical multilingualism. The focus is on both the names of the deceased engraved on grave markers and inscriptions other than names. The article demonstrates that the reasons vary for the multilingualism within and between these two layers of the analysis and that these two layers partly open different windows to the multilingual past of a community. In addition, the cemetery landscape is transformed by commemorative practices: Because they change over time, the cemetery’s linguistic landscape is not a direct historical replica of the linguistic resources of past members of the community.