Several names, several identities? The orthography of Finnish country people’s names from the 18th to 20th centuries

Abstract

In this article, I shall examine how the personal names of the Finnish-speaking population of rural Finland, who themselves were generally unable to write, were written in Swedish equivalents in various documents in the 18th and 19th centuries, and how this influenced the formation of their identities. The advent of laws governing language towards the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century was manifested in official documents in which the authorities gradually started to write personal names in Finnish. The population of the countryside began to acquire the ability to write finally when compulsory universal education came into force in 1921. Before that, the majority of the rural population had signed documents by making their mark. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, marks and signatures were used to some extent side by side, so therefore the use of a mark does not always indicate that the person was unable to write. In the life of the rural people the different ways in which their names were written were all part of their social identity.