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Paper short abstract:

Since 2014, the Oulu Cultural and Heritage Center has worked to maintain their northern Wisconsin community. Since the community shifted to English-speaking in the early-1900s, the role of Finnish heritage has blurred the lines between both language and culture, as well as ethnic and local.

Paper long abstract:

This project grew from an initial, mutual interest from volunteers at the Oulu Cultural and Heritage Center and folklorists and linguists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in documenting the language of Finnish heritage speakers in the historically Finnish American community of Oulu, Wisconsin. The community had shifted from mostly bilingual Finnish-English speaking in the early 1900s to majority English speaking about fifty years later. While the heritage language is no longer used for daily communication, there was a gradual shift whereby the secondary, symbolic associations of the language became privileged over its communicative usage, reaching a stage that Shandler (2008) terms postvernacular language. Importantly, these symbolic associations are closely tied to material culture, music, and vernacular architecture, suggesting that transdisciplinary approaches to heritage language are necessary to capture the multimodal reality of heritage language usage and change, as well as its connection to cultural performance. This poster discusses the work being done at the OCHC and the ways community members are participating in and driving the reallocation of symbols of Finnish heritage to denote local history, culture, and language. Ultimately, a transdisciplinary approach spanning linguistics and folklore is necessary to capture the ways this reallocation blurs the lines between both language and culture, as well as ethnic and local identity.

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