Oikeakielisyyttä ja kielen käytäntöä Virittäjässä

• Aino Piehl

Avainsanat: kielenhuolto, Virittäjä

Abstrakti

Language standardisation and guidance on correct usage in Virittäjä (englanti)

4/1996 (100)

Aino Piehl (Research Centre for the Languages of Finland; [e-mail]):

LANGUAGE STANDARDISATION AND GUIDANCE ON CORRECT USAGE IN VIRITTJ

The article describes the development of Virittj's section on language standardisation and correct Finnish usage. The article is based on a corpus of all the texts (739) published in that section in the 1920s, 1940s, 1960s and between 1980 and 1988. Since 1896, the language standardisation section of Virittj was, for almost a hundred years, the most important forum for debate relating to issues of correct Finnish usage. Between 1928 and 1968 it was also the medium for publishing the recommendations of the collective language standardisation bodies, the language committee of the Finnish Literature Society, later language board of the Academy of Finland, the Modern Finnish Department and the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland. The last language standardisation section appeared in 1994.

The most assiduous contributors to the language standardisation section were a small group of activists, which consisted of the key members of the collective language standardisation bodies. They were researchers of Finnish. The editors of Virittj were particularly assiduous. Writings on language standardisation were most numerous in the 1940s and the 1980s. The most common type of writing was a discussion of a given error. This type accounted for some 60 percent of all the writings in the corpus. In relative terms, this type of writings were most numerous in the 1980s. The section was also used for criticising the language of literature and of the media (particularly in the 1920s), for suggesting new norms for written Finnish or changes to existing norms, for discussing them, for informing about the decisions of language standardisation bodies, and for suggesting new words.

In recent years, writers to Virittj have not been interested in discussing phenomena of language usage from a normative viewpoint. The prestige of the language standardisation section of Virittj was great; writings on language usage were looked upon as if they were rules, even when they did not inform about the decisions of language standardisation bodies. This perhaps proved fateful to the section. Even private expressions of opinion on details of written language and matters of preference were interpreted as having been more generally accepted by authorities on language standardisation, and the official language standardisation was seen to pay too much attention on matters of marginal importance that required no regulation.