Department of English
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11875/2417
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Browsing Department of English by Author "Halmari, Helena"
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Item Dividing the world: The dichotomous rhetoric of Ronald Reagan(Multilingua, 1993) Halmari, HelenaThe language of politics often divides our world into two groups: those who share our own values, and those who supposedly oppose them. Ex-President Ronald Reagan was a master of the use of dichotomous language. His dichotomies were most clearly present in his descriptions of the U.S.- Soviet relations and the American and the Soviet military. The military build-up on the American side was exculpated, while the Soviet military build-up was vilified. With the change of the Soviet leadership in 1985, Reagan’s dichotomous thinking was challenged, and towards the end of Reagan’s presidency a slight change in his rhetoric can be noticed: he started to acknowledge a good side to the Soviet Union; however, there was often a tendency to denigrate the observed good. New areas of dichotomies arose, and vilification flourished till the end of his presidency.Item On the Maintenance and Use of Heritage Finnish among Today’s North American Finnish Migrants: A Survey(Transnational Finnish Mobilities, 2019) Halmari, HelenaIn this chapter, I discuss the maintenance of the Finnish language among today’s North American ethnic Finns, those who have migrated from Finland into North America relatively recently, and, most pronouncedly, after the Great Migration years from Finland during the transition to the twentieth century. I am specifically interested in the patterns of the use and maintenance of Finnish among this group of new migrants, whose life circumstances are drastically different from the lives of the old migrant population (for accounts of the latter, see, e.g., Virtanen 1975; Virtaranta et al. 1993; Kero 1996; Alanen 2012; Kostiainen 2014; for studies on contemporary Finnish North Americans, see, e.g., Korkiasaari & Roinila 2005; Kiriakos 2014; Leinonen 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2013, 2014a, 2014b). The pattern of the old-wave migrant population typically showed strong maintenance of Finnish by the first generation and speedy linguistic assimilation to the mainstream (i.e., acquisition of English) by the second generation (cf., e.g., Valdes 2005, 2006). Describing the situation of old-wave Finnish migrants, Martin and Jönsson-Korhola (1993) argue that the command of Finnish was not regarded as important; sometimes it was considered even embarrassing.2 What this chapter begins to explore is whether the higher socioeconomic status and higher education levels of the recent Finnish migrants (see Leinonen 2011a; Habti & Koikkalainen 2014; Warinowski 2016) may have influenced a change in how the command of Finnish is regarded. Is there, for instance, an articulated effort to pass heritage Finnish on to the next generation? With a limited population, this exploratory study contributes to the larger field of heritage language maintenance by looking at what ethnic Finns in North America — a minority within minorities — think about their heritage language and what measures they take to try to pass that language to the next generation (on heritage languages and their maintenance in North America, see, i.a., Fishman 1991; Kainulainen 1993; Peyton, Ranard & McGinnish 2001; Valdes 2005, 2006; Polinsky & Kagan 2007; Kelleher 2010).