Double diglossia – lower class writing in 19th-century Finland

Abstract

Abstract This paper analyses a number of typical features of lower-class writing in 19th-century Finland. The data consists of business letters written by local traders and farmers. These letters are compared to letters by Forest Finns, a group of early Finnish migrants to Scandinavia. The business letters are marked by three distinct influences: the older literary tradition, local dialects and the ‘rising literary genres’ of the 19thcentury. On the basis of the morpho-phonological level of the corpus texts, it will be argued that the lower-class writers intended to write a standard language, not a dialect.

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