The lost mother tongue: An interview study with Finnish war children

Abstract

This article presents the third study of an interview investigation concerning 10 Finnish war children who were evacuated during the World War II to Sweden and who did not return to live in Finland after the war. The focus is on how they remembered or did not remember their early experiences of displacement and on how they expressed thoughts about their childhood and their adult life. We found that all of them as adults still bore signs of trauma. The younger the children were at the time of the evacuation, the more difficult or even impossible it was for them to think or fantasize about the past. It was consequently not possible for them to work through their experiences of loneliness, absence, and loss. All of them had lost their Finnish mother tongue and their ties to their earlier lives in Finland. The present study focuses on how their thinking and language changed when they during the interview talked about their childhood. Effects were seen on the structure of the language, syntax as well as on their word choices. Their narratives could become incoherent, with unfinished sentences and their emotional language collapsed. We compare their descriptions of their childhood with their accounts of their adult life.