Abstract
This article examines the various ways in which the Finnish language gets manifested in Finnish American lives in the present-day United States, and the methodologies that help to investigate these manifestations. It joins the line of the latest sociolinguistic and ethnographic research that conceptualizes language as a set of context-based, socially constructed, and multimodal resources. Methodologically, the article employs language biographies and material ethnography as tools to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences that Finnish Americans relate to their heritage language. The methodologies are presented through a case study of a third-generation Finnish American woman who has taken strong agency concerning her heritage language. The findings suggest that in order to understand individual experiences, the Finnish language needs to be conceptualized as a multimodal phenomenon. Recognizing material and emotional resources as parts of the language repertoire gives credit also to those with less fluent Finnish skills and shows the heritage language speakers' situation in a more positive light.
