Susanna Noki, MA
Doctoral student
University of Tampere, Department of History
E-mail: susanna.noki@uta.fi
Tel. +358 3 3551 6896, +358 50 413 5959
Postal address:
The Research Institute for Social Sciences
FI-33014 University of Tampere
The Creation of Finnish Political Vocabulary from 1820–1870
The aim of Susanna Noki’s dissertation is to study the political and social agendas of the active creators of the Finnish language. As opposed to studying the orthography or standardization of written Finnish, the focus is on the development of the language and the creation of a political vocabulary between the years 1820 and 1870.
There may have been a general consensus amongst the language planners about regarding the establishment of Finnish as the official language, but the unanimity ended there. The study closely follows these sometimes quite heated discussions of language formation, the proper use and spelling of loan words, and the construction of political concepts. These political texts written by language planners and lexical inventors are seen, for example by Quentin Skinner, as speech acts in debates.
The very mode of Finnish concept and literary formation in 19th century Finland is understood as having been a conscious act as opposed to a pure and straightforward form of translation. In other words, the idea of this study is to take a step further from the history of political concepts as a history of translation. The creation of the literary Finnish language and the related new concepts is seen as interplay of agents, political and social events, and language.