Saami languages

This paper is a result of collaborative work between language documentation, language technology and corpus-based sociolinguistics and includes both applied and theoretical research aspects. We aim at contributing to diversity linguistics by improving current methodology for the building of comprehensive databases for future research on endangered and little-studied speech communities. Applying language technology in language documentation helps us to create more systematically annotated corpora, rather than eclectic data collections. Ultimately, the multimodal corpora we create will be useful for quantitative investigations into synchronic variation and change in Kildin Saami.

Kildin Saami (Glottolog: kild1236) is a seriously endangered and under-described language spoken ac- tively by no more than a few hundred speakers on the Kola Peninsula in North-West Russia. Although the number of speakers is decreasing rapidly, recent language planning and revitalization attempts have opened new domains of language use, for instance in print, radio and social media (Rießler 2014). Changes induced by this language shift to Russian have been documented on all levels of linguistic structure in Kildin Saami: phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse-pragmatics and lexicon (Rießler 2007; Rießler 2009; Blokland and Rießler 2011) and variation and change in function words specifically are dealt with in Karvovskaya (2011), Zhivotova (2014a), Zhivotova (2014b), and Kotcheva and Rießler (2015). Rießler and Karvovskaya (2013) have argued (based on the use of focus particles) that not only shift-induced lan- guage attrition is responsible for synchronic variation and change in Kildin Saami, but language planning and the introduction of new (mostly written) domains of language use, typically occupied by language activists with puristic attitudes, can lead to “revitalization-induced” language change, too.

Our investigation into variation and change in function words is based on a comprehensive corpus of spoken or written text modi of formal or informal registers originating from speakers for whom we also have comprehensive speaker biographies. Our transcribed (in Standard Kildin Saami orthography) spoken text data as well as the written text data are stored in a similar XML format, using ELAN.1 The pro- gram allows for transcription, calculation of basic frequency statistics and the creation of concordances in addition to extracting, coding and preparing statistical analysis using R.2 Different to many endangered language documentation projects, which annotate manually or semi-manually, we apply more automated corpus data annotation, specifically a part-of-speech tagger based on finite state transducer technology and programmed in collaboration with the Center for Sámi Language Technology3 (cf. Blokland, Gersten- berger, Fedina, Partanen, Rießler, and Wilbur 2014+).

The quantitative evaluation of data from our corpus provides significant evidence for proving prelim- inary claims by Zhivotova (2014a) and Zhivotova (2014b) that the use of borrowed vs. native function words is not dialectal or the result of individual speaker preferences, but determined by the choice of text modi or registers: whereas the native formatives are used consistently in formal written texts, borrowed formatives occur most typically in informal spoken texts. Furthermore, the degree of speakers’ language loss is also significant: fully competent speakers use borrowed function words much less regularly, which is significant even in informal speech.

We can also show that “purist variants” (Rießler and Karvovskaya 2013) are relevant for sociolinguistic description. In small speech communities undergoing revitalization, such variants might, in fact, be the potential survivors of language variation and change. Therefore, the documentary linguist needs to be sensitive to all kinds of variation in the data in order to make the documentation as complete and useful as possible.

Saamelaisia on yritetty kasvatuksellisesti sopeuttaa
valtakulttuuriin jo 1600-luvulta lähtien, jolloin
kirkko käynnisti saamelaisten ”sivistämisen”.
Sittemmin vasta 1970-luvulla saamelaisten tarpeita
alettiin huomioida koulutuksessa ensimmäisen
kerran missioajan jälkeen (Aikio-Puoskari
2001, 225). Saamelaisopetuksen omaleimaista
kehittymistä ovat hidastaneet alkuperäiskansoihin
kohdistunut kolonialismin ja sulauttamisen
historia. Saamelaisten asuttamista maista Norja
on kehittänyt saamelaisopetusta pisimmälle.
Myös Ruotsissa on itsenäinen saamelaiskoulujärjestelmä
ja vuodesta 2011 lähtien saamelainen
opetussuunnitelma. Suomi on jäänyt tästä kehityksestä
jälkeen. Venäjällä saamelaisopetuksen tilanne
on vaativa.

Второй выпуск альманаха продолжает публикацию статей и материалов, относящихся к различным разделам уралистики. В работах освещаются общие вопросы уралистики, вопросы фонетики, грамматики и лексикологии различных языков уральской семьи. В ряде статей анализируются проблемы фольклористики, литературоведения и истории. Определенное место в альманахе занимают публикации языковых материалов, научная полемика и дискуссии.
Альманах предназначен для специалистов по финно-угорским и самодийским языкам, может быть интересен широкому кругу читателей-носителей уральских языков.

Standard Russian and the Russian Pomor dialect are relatively new arrivals on the Kola Peninsula in north-western Russia. The indigenous languages spoken there comprise the Saamic languages Skolt Saami, Kildin Saami and Ter Saami, which belong to the Uralic language family. Speakers of the distantly related Uralic language Iźva Komi, a Permic language, arrived in the 1880s. The present article sketches recent language contact situations between Saami, Iźva Komi and Russian on the Kola Peninsula and describes the impact of these contacts in the respective languages.

'Were there Vikings in Finland?’ Fibula, Fabula, Fact – The Viking Age in Finland is intended to provide essential foundations for approaching the Viking Age in Finland. The volume consists of a general introduction followed by nineteen chapters and a closing discussion. The nineteen chapters are oriented to provide introductions to the sources, methods and perspectives of diverse disciplines. Discussions are presented from fields including archaeology, folklore studies, genetics, geopolitics, historiography, language history, linguistics, palaeobotany, semiotics and toponymy. Each chapter is intended to help open the resources and the history of discourse of the particular discipline in a way that will be accessible to specialists from other fields, specialists from outside Finland, and also to non-specialist readers and students who may be more generally interested in the topic.

The Finnic languages, among them Finnish and Estonian, are well known for their large inventories of cases. As large case systems tend to develop especially through agglutination of adpositions, it is noteworthy that none of the thirteen cases reconstructed for Proto-Finnic have traditionally been considered to derive from adpositional phrases. However, in this paper, such an explanation is presented for the origin of the Proto-Finnic external local cases or the so-called l-cases, i.e. the adessive (*-llA < *-l-nA), the ablative (*-l-tA), and the allative (*-l-en). The element-l-has traditionally been equated with a derivational suffix indicating locality, but against the received view this paper argues that the endings emerged via agglutination of the Proto-Uralic postpositions *ül-nä [on-LOCATIVE], *ül-tä [on-ABLATIVE] and *üli-ŋ [on-LATIVE], based on the relational noun root *ül(i)-'location on/above'. The argumentation is based on rich comparative data from the Saami, Mordvin, Permic and Samoyed branches of the Uralic language family. Through a thorough analysis of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of the Finnic l-cases and their proposed cognates, it is argued that the received view on the origin of the l-cases must be rejected as an illegitimately canonized hypothesis that was never tested through systematic application of the comparative method. Instead, the comparative analysis strongly supports the new hypothesis of the postpositional origin of the l-cases.

Using etymological methods, the present study has researched four Sinitic and Uralic shared etymologies (etyma). Two of them form a rhyme correspondence. Three of them form an onset correspondence. These regular sound changes validate the genetic connection between Sinitic and Uralic. The Sino-Finnic term for 'moon, month' is among these four etyma. It is demonstrated that this term should be aboriginal in Sino-Uralic languages.