The Archive of Estonian Dialects and Finno-Ugric Languages at the Institute of the Estonian Language

This report gives an overview of the materials in the Archive of Estonian Dialects and Finno-Ugric Languages (AEDFUL) at the Institute of the Estonian Language (IEL). The AEDFUL holds the world’s largest collection of Estonian dialect examples as well as many other materials on other Finno-Ugric languages. Materials in the AEDFUL have been collected by researchers from the IEL and the Mother Tongue Society during the 20th century. All the Estonian dialect areas as well as all of the Finnic languages are represented in written and/or recorded form. Especially large amounts of language materials have been collected for Livonian, Ingrian, and Votic. At the beginning of the 21st century when active collecting work ended, a new era began focused on digitization and making these materials publicly available. At present, electronic databases and dictionaries are available via the Internet.

Borrowing morphology

Veps is a Finnic minority language that has long been influenced by Russian, the prestige language in the speech area. The influence of Russian can be perceived in all subsystems of the Veps language, but hardly any research has been done on its impact on morphology. The current paper focuses on the influence of Russian on the Veps indefinite pronouns and their restructuring. The contemporary Veps indefinite pronoun system is based on the use of different affixes and particles, i.e., indefiniteness markers, which are attached to interrogative stems. This article describes the various Veps indefiniteness markers, which have been acquired via morpheme transfer (MAT) and morphological pattern transfer (PAT) from Russian. The borrowing of indefiniteness markers is typical for languages under the very strong influence of another language. According to contemporary studies, the motivation for borrowing should primarily be attributed to sociolinguistic factors and less to structural-typological similarities of the languages in question. In the Veps language community, such sociolinguistic factors are the minority status of the Veps language and the bilingualism of its speakers.

On the use of perfect and pluperfect in Estonian dialects

The present paper examines the use of two compound tenses – perfect and pluperfect – in Estonian. Perfect and pluperfect have emerged due to the influence of the Baltic and Germanic languages and are used frequently in Estonian. However, while looking at the usage frequency derived from the Corpus of Estonian Dialects, dialect areas display remarkable differences, which can be explained either by local language contacts with Swedish, Russian, Latvian, and Finnic languages (Votic, Ingrian, and Finnish) or by functional differences in the use of compound tenses. It appears that there are two main regions where the compound tenses are used more often compared to other areas: the Insular dialect and Mulgi dialect regions. The increase of compound tenses in the Insular dialect could be a result of contacts with Swedish. However, the Insular dialect also exhibits a high number of negated utterances using the perfect reflecting changes in the formation of negation more generally in this area. The Mulgi dialect shows a high number of pluperfect forms that can be related to the abundance of reported narratives in the data, but also as an increase of using pluperfect as an evidential strategy, which is probably a result of contacts with Latvian.

Expeditions among the Lutsi Estonians and the design of Language Learning Materials

The Lutsi Estonians (Lutsis) are a historically South Estonian-speaking minority that has inhabited a network of more than 50 villages in the historical rural parishes of Pilda, Nirza, Brigi, and Mērdzene surrounding the city of Ludza, in the Latgale region of eastern Latvia, for at least three to four centuries. Between 2013 and 2016, I received funding from the Kone Foundation to document the present state of the Lutsis and to write a Lutsi language primer for Latvian speakers. The first part of this paper gives an overview of previous work on Lutsi followed by a description of the present state of the population of Lutsi descendants as I found it during the period of my Kone-funded research. The second part of this paper describes the Lutsi language primer, beginner’s grammar reference, and dictionary, which were the other main products of this research and discusses plans for their future use. The first extensive documentation of the Lutsis, their culture, and language was undertaken by researcher Oskar Kallas in 1893. Relatively substantial subsequent documentation of Lutsi was carried out over subsequent decades as the Lutsi population continued to be assimilated primarily into the Latvian speakers of their home region. The last fluent speaker died in 2006 and the last known passive partial speaker died in 2014. Presently, some fragmentary knowledge of Lutsi survives among descendants; however, the Lutsi Estonians today have shifted entirely to using Latvian, and less frequently also Russian, as their primary language.

The Finnish of Rautalampi and Värmland

In this paper some of the features of the Finnish spoken in the former great-parish of Rautalampi and Värmland are discussed. These two Finnish varieties are, owing to their common historical background, closely affiliated, both being defined as Eastern Finnish Savo dialects. These varieties were isolated from each other for hundreds of years and the circumstances of the two speech communities are in many respects different. The language contact situation in Värmland involves Swedish varieties and Värmland Finnish but limited contact with other Finnish varieties. The contact situation in what once was the great-parish of Rautalampi involves mainly Finnish varieties, both dialects and Standard Finnish. Social and economic circumstances have also had an effect on the contact situations, especially since the 19th century when Finland was separated from Sweden and industrialization made its definite entrance into both areas. The differing language contact situations have in some respects yielded different results. This paper provides examples of the differences, which have occurred as an effect of the circumstances in Rautalampi and in Värmland. I provide examples from the phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic levels and discuss them in light of the language contact situation in these areas.

Syntactic and aspectual functions of Latvian verbal prefixes in Livonian

This paper presents an analysis of an assumed contact-induced change in the Livonian modes of expressing perfective aspect: the adoption of Latvian-origin verbal prefixes expressing perfective aspect. The main objective of this article is to determine whether long-standing contact between Livonian and Latvian has led to the introduction of verbal prefixes as both pure lexical elements and, in parallel, as markers of grammatical functions that distinguish Livonian from its closest cognate languages. The current study is based on the data derived from unpublished recordings and published written material representing spoken Livonian, already extinct as a first language in the traditional speech area. There are a total of eleven Latvian-origin verbal prefixes in Livonian, a language which usually does not display this category. The prefixes are as follows: aiz-, ap-, at-, ie-, iz-, nuo-, pa-, pie-, pōr-, sa-, and uz-. In Latvian, most of these items can be used as bound verbal prefixes and also prepositions marking adverbial functions. In Livonian, these prefixes can be combined with both Livonian and Latvian verbs but, as a rule – except for pa- – they do not occur as prepositions. The frequency of their occurrence in the data varies considerably and, presumably, corresponds to the degree that a given prefix may derive perfective verbs. In fact, verbal prefixation can be considered, to some extent, a means for expressing perfective aspect in Livonian, thereby adding a secondary strategy to the inherent Finnic way of expressing aspectual oppositions, namely the object case alternation and verbal particles.