The Finnish population of the U.P. of Michigan has been there at least over a century. They probably started emigrating to the American Midwest about the same time as the Swedes and Norwegians to Minnesota, Wisconsin, & the Dakotas. When contacts and marriage with other ethic groups is limited, languages or vestiges or languages do tend to survive in the States.
When I was a little kid, we moved to a small, eastern Pennsylvanian town that had been founded by Germans in 1740. In the 1960s you could still hear the German dialect of the original settlers spoken on the streets by the old folks. Modern German speakers do have a difficult time with it, though. The same thing might happen if you tried to speak modern Finnish with one of the Michigan speakers whose knowledge of Finnish was passed down through time in the family.
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Date: 2009-04-01 03:00 pm (UTC)When I was a little kid, we moved to a small, eastern Pennsylvanian town that had been founded by Germans in 1740. In the 1960s you could still hear the German dialect of the original settlers spoken on the streets by the old folks. Modern German speakers do have a difficult time with it, though. The same thing might happen if you tried to speak modern Finnish with one of the Michigan speakers whose knowledge of Finnish was passed down through time in the family.