Finnish reported speech and Swedish intratextual translations in 17th-century court records

Abstract

Abstract This paper studies on multilingual administrative writing in Sweden during the early modern era of emerging national language ideology within the domain of court writing. The source material for this study consists of lower-court records from Finnish-speaking areas of the Swedish realm c. 1620–1700. The court system in Sweden was reformed in 1614 with the establishment of appellate courts that scrutinized the sentences passed by lower courts. Court records were written in Swedish, the official language of administrative writing of the period, but certain segments, notably represented speech, could be rendered in Finnish. This required textual mediation between the prescribed Swedish language of the court protocol, and the non-standard spoken Finnish in the courtrooms. The aim is to examine the embedding strategies, retention patterns, and textual mediation in the multilingual writing of 17th-century Finnish court scribes. The results show that Finnish is retained for especially pertinent or untranslatable witness statements. At the end of the 17th century, the use of parallel Swedish translations and clarifications to Finnish items increased. It is argued that this increase is due to the imposition of autocracy in 1680 and a concomitant push towards monolingual Swedish uniformity within the entire realm.