Human Diversity seminar 24.4.2024, Norvik and Ivaska

Wednesday 24.4.2024
“Finnic languages in their Circum-Baltic space”
Miina Norvik, Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu, Estonia
Abstract:
The Circum-Baltic Area is a meeting point of languages from two language families – Uralic and Indo-European. Finnic languages, which are in focus in this talk, have had close contacts with Indo-European languages belonging to three distinct branches – Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic. Or to put it more precisely, the people speaking these languages have been in contact, not the languages per se. Contact situations are also reflected in the current state-of-affairs (linguistic and genetic picture etc.).

The aim of the talk is to discuss results obtained by analyzing the spread of linguistic features belonging to different structural levels (phonology, morphosyntax). The main purpose is to offer a micro-areal analysis of (dis)similarities and distributions of languages constituting the Finnic-speaking area with a main focus on the Southern Finnic languages. As will be shown, on several occasions, the results align with geography.

The data originate from UraTyp, a typological database of the Uralic languages. Altogether the database contains 360 linguistic features whose presence or absence (e.g., Are there two sets of local cases?) is coded for 35 Uralic languages, among them 11 Finnic languages. For an analysis on phonology, we took 50 features from UraTyp and complemented them with additional features relevant for the Finnic languages. The final dataset contained 36 Finnic languages/language varieties, all represented with 58 features. Analyses on morphosyntax, in turn, take a different approach by zooming in into a handful of features, and considering not only the structure but also the form.

“Identifying individual Finnish speakers’ dialectal background using supervised machine learning”
Ilmari Ivaska, Finnish, Finno-Ugric and Scandinavian languages, University of Turku