Eesti keel XVIII sajandi kirikumeetrikates

Since the second half of the 17th century, parish registers served as administrative documents in which local pastors recorded the births, marriages, and deaths of congregation members. The matrix language of the registers was German. However, the names of peasants were entered following the Estonian model (byname + given name). In some registers, Estonian was also used systematically for additional information concerning individuals from lower social strata. This article investigates how the use of Estonian in parish registers evolved over time, whether there were specific geographic areas where Estonian was used more consistently, and to what extent language choice in the entries can be linked to the ideological views of pastors. To this end, preserved marriage records from four time points were analyzed: the earliest surviving 17th-century register and registers from the years 1720, 1750, and 1780. Of the 25 surviving 17th-century registers, only two can be classified as Estonian-language records. By the 1720s, however, approximately one-third of the records were in Estonian, and this proportion remained relatively stable throughout the 18th century. Geographically, two regions emerged where Estonian-language records were more common. By contrast, in some regions no Estonian-language registers were kept at all. In cases where Estonian was used consistently, this choice cannot be attributed to random code-switching in a bilingual context. Pastors who consistently used Estonian were often pietist in outlook, more familiar with local circumstances, or sympathetic to the Moravian Brethren movement. A deeper understanding of the factors behind language choice would require data from additional time points, comprehensive biographical information on pastors, and a multidimensional prosopographical analysis linking linguistic and biographical data. Nonetheless, based on the present analysis, it can be concluded that Estonian held a significant role in 18th-century parish registers.