Workshop on Exploring past human contacts: Uralic and beyond
Workshop on Exploring past human contacts: Uralic and beyond
Arcanum lobby and A112 (1st floor, Arcanuminkuja 1, Turku) and Zoom webinar (Tuesday Zoom and Wednesday Zoom)
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Participation in these seminars allows students to earn credits for HUDI001. Further details can be found on Peppi.
Seminar poster
Tuesday 2.6. Part 1. Computational methods to identify (linguistic) contact areas: Evolutionary linguistics approaches and NLP
When speakers of different languages coexist within the same geographic region, their interaction may lead to language contact, with sharing lexical items, grammatical features, or pronunciation patterns. If the sharing is multilateral and impacts languages across families or subfamilies, the contact area can be called a linguistic area. In this session, we explore computational methods to identify language contacts and areas using large linguistic databases.
9.30-10.15 Coffee served (Arcanum Aula)
10.15-10.30 Opening and orientating words
10.30 – 11.10 Nico Neureiter (ETH Zürich): sBayes: Clustering in the Presence of Confounders Reveals Linguistic Areas
11.10 – 11.50 Matías Guzmán Naranjo (University of Bergen): Bayesian methods for detecting correlated diffusion of linguistic features in
language contact scenarios
11.50 – 12.30 Peter Ranacher (University of Turku/ University of Zürich): The Role of Geography in Tracing Language Contact
12.30 – 13.30 Break
13.30 – 14.10 Outi Vesakoski (University of Turku): Model-based clustering analyses revealing linguistic contacts?
14.10 – 14.50 Tuukka Törö (University of Helsinki): Novel Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Diversity Using Speech Embeddings
14.50 – 15.30 Veronika Laippala (University of Turku): Towards analysing linguistic diversity in massively multilingual web-scale registers
15.30 – 16.00 Closing words and discussion
Wednesday 3.6. Part 2. Case studies in identifying Uralic contacts
Linguistic diversity evolves as interplay between linguistic divergence and convergence. This part concentrates on (pre)historical linguistic areas and linguistic contacts within and around Uralic languages. The talks will present how the contacts are studied in different levels of language, such as typological features and lexicon.
9.15 – 9.20 Opening and orientating words
9.20 – 10.00 Terhi Honkola (University of Turku): Contact influences in kinship terms of Uralic languages
10.00 – 10.40 Rasmus Bjørn (University of Copenhagen): Uralic connected – Triangulating Bronze Age Eurasia
10.40 – 11.20 Silja-Maija Spets (University of Turku): Language contacts in Volga area
11.20 – 12.30 Break
12.30 – 13.10 Idaliia Fedotova (University of Eastern Finland): Language contact and areal convergence in Western Siberia
13.10 – 13.50 Janne Saarikivi (University of Helsinki): Comparative, typological and areal methodologies in defining historical linguistic areas
13.50 – 14.30 Tatiana Kachkovskaia (University of Turku): Inferring linguistic contact areas in Northern Eurasia: sBayes and model-based clustering analyses
14.30 – 15.00 Closing words and discussion
Scope
This workshop brings together researchers working on language contact, cultural transmission, and related phenomena, with a particular focus on the Uralic languages. It aims to encourage open discussion across disciplinary and methodological boundaries.
Aims
The workshop has three main objectives:
1. To review and discuss recent methodological approaches for detecting and modelling contact phenomena in cultural and linguistic data.
2. To present and compare case studies on contact-induced change in Uralic languages, alongside relevant examples from other families and regions.
3. To facilitate exchange between researchers working with different frameworks and tools.