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This thesis examines fragmentary Finnish in Late Old Swedish charters (c. 1350–1526) issued in the Finnish part of the Swedish realm, the diocese of Åbo. Consisting mostly of proper names, albeit occasionally displaying Finnish inflectional and derivational morphology, these fragments have previously not generally been regarded as representing actual written Finnish, but rather as onomastic loans or transcriptions of oral language by more or less monolingual Swedish scribes. This thesis attempts a description and analysis of the Swedish–Finnish language mixture, to see to what extent the embedding of Finnish segments in these Swedish-language charters can be said to reflect scribal proficiency in Finnish or a lack thereof.

The thesis relies on theoretical and empirical findings in the fields of code-switching and historical sociolinguistics. To provide a socio-historical context for the linguistic analysis, sociolinguistic conditions in medieval Finland and the textual genre of medieval charters are outlined. The bilingual segments in the data are then described and compared with models of code-switching from modern studies, to see whether their form corresponds to patterns that could be expected of more or less balanced bilinguals. The choice between Swedish and Finnish linguistic variants is also considered in the light of textual and sociolinguistic factors, and a study is made of Finnish grammatical transfer in the scribal Swedish of medieval Finland.

Although the scarcity of the medieval data does not allow definite conclusions, the tentative results reveal a language mixture that is mainly well formed, though limited in scope and with some instances of scribal errors that could be due to a lack of proficiency in Finnish. On the other hand, the insertion of Finnish segments shows a stylistic patterning that suggests a linguistic awareness on the part of the scribes, and the choice of Swedish prepositions in certain constructions differs quantitatively from the norm in non-Finnish parts of medieval Sweden, in a way that can partly be attributed to the influence of Finnish locative case semantics. While it is apparent that proficiency levels in Finnish must have varied somewhat among medieval scribes in Finland, the results point to a more or less bilingual proficiency, or at least extensive passive knowledge of Finnish.

In this paper I will examine the mixing of Swedish and Finnishin medieval charters from Finland from the 14th to the 16th century. In thesecharters, where Swedish from the mid-14th century onwards functions asthe de jure framing language, one can find embedded Finnish-languagelinguistic segments, mainly in complex personal and topographic designations.Apart from Finnish proper nouns, flectional and derivational endingsabound, and there are even sporadic occurrences of common nouns.With evidence from research in other mixed-language texts from medievalEurope, I present the following four main conditioning factors formixed language text formation as identified by previous scholars: 1) scriballinguistic deficiency, 2) traces of oral language, 3) pragmatic benefits of theuse of vernacular for achieving intelligibility, and 4) scribal multilingualism.In earlier research, the aforementioned language-mixing has hardlybeen commented on, and if it has been it has mostly been considered to betranscribed oral language rendered in a more or less obscured manner bynon-Finnish-speaking Swedish scribes. I argue that all of the four abovementionedconditioning factors for written language-mixing must be consideredin studying fragmentary vernacular language in Finnish charters.What might seem to be linguistic confusion at first glance can instead beinterpreted as multilingual proficiency and an intentional use of multilingualresources for communicative ends.

This paper aims to analyze Swedish-Finnish mixed-language personal designations in medieval charters from Finland from the perspective of code-switching. A data set of 718 locative adverbials containing Finnish toponyms is related to empirical findings in the morphosyntax of modern Finnish-English code-switching. I argue that the morphosyntactic marking of Finnish toponyms in the medieval charters is concordant with syntactic patterns in modern code-switching. In earlier scholarship, this language-mixing was thought to be the result of linguistic confusion. The present results would indicate that the medieval scribes of Finland in fact were fluent code-switchers that used multilingual resources to their advantage.