Place names used by first generation Finnish Americans

ANS 2025, February 22, 2025 Place names used by the first generation Finnish Americans: examining migration letters by Hanna Virranpää During the mass migration, between 1870 and 1940 approx. 350 000 Finns immigrated from Finland to North America. Correspondence was the most typical way to stay connected with relatives and friends who remained in Finland. The research examines what kind of places names the Finnish of the first immigrant generation have used in their letters. The research material consists of 434 letters sent from North America to Finland between 1881 and 1940. All letters are written in Finnish. All place names that refer to places in North America have been collected from the letters: thus, the place name material consists of 197 different place names, which are used 695 times in the letters. My main research questions are, what place names writers used, and what happens to the place name, when a person who possibly doesn’t know any English, uses it. Place names are analyzed using sosio-onomastics and contact onomastics. The analysis examines the spellings in which the names are used, the language of the place names, how some place names have been adapted from English to Finnish. The results show that place names used by Finnish Americans can be divided into five different categories. Biography: Hanna Virranpää is a Doctoral Researcher in Doctoral Programme in Language Studies at University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include onomastics, sociolinguistics, historical sociolinguistics, history and migration studies.