Successful exchange of ideas from the Human Contacts workshop

A two-day workshop titled “Exploring Past Human Contacts: Uralic and Beyond” was held on 2–3 June 2026 at the University of Turku. The workshop brought together researchers working on language contact, cultural transmission, and related phenomena, with a particular focus on the Uralic languages. Contact was made and convergence achieved.

Presenters were Nico Neureiter, Matías Guzmán Naranjo, Peter Ranacher, Outi Vesakoski, Tuukka Törö, Veronika Laippala, Terhi Honkola, Rasmus Bjørn, Silja-Maija Spets, Idaliia Fedotova, Janne Saarikivi and Tatiana Kachkovskaia.

We warmly thank all presenters for their insightful presentations! Thank you all for participating the workshop. and for the great discussions and for making the workshop such a stimulating and collaborative event!

“It was inspiring that we are from different backgrounds using different methods and approaches but trying to achieve the same goal for understanding human diversity in a more holistic way. Traditional and computational methods both have their strenghts and in the workshop we were able to draw from each others’ strengths to plan the next steps in combining our knowledge for future studies.”

 

Photos: Jenni Santaharju