Southern Finnic typology in the light of new comprehensive data sets

• In Event: Emerging Words and Lexicons (Hybrid Panel)

Abstract

The past decades have witnessed the emergence of various online databases containing structural information. The most widely known of these is WALS (the World Atlas of Language Structures) which currently presents information on 2,662 languages. In the foreseeable future, another large database will become available – the Grambank, which aims to include as many as 3,000 languages (see more at https://glottobank.org/). A family-wide database – the Uralic Typological Database (UraTyp) – will soon be made public in cooperation with the Grambank team. This talk introduces the UraTyp database and its modes of use. More precisely, it presents the database and shows, as an example, how it has been used to analyze the position of the Southern Finnic languages within the Uralic language family. The preliminary results are also compared to the typological profile of the Baltic languages, and show multiple Baltic influences especially in the southernmost Finnic varieties.
The UraTyp database includes information on 360 features spanning the domains of syntax, morphology, phonology, and lexicon. 195 of the features originate from the list of features developed by the Grambank team, 165 were added by the UraTyp database team. The majority of features are given as binary questions showing either the presence or absence of a particular feature or function. As of now, data has been collected from more than 30 Uralic languages.

Short Bio

Miina Norvik was born on 22 August 1985 in Tallinn, Estonia. She holds a PhD degree in the Finnic languages and defended her thesis in 2015 at the University of Tartu. Her research focuses mainly on the syntax of the Finnic languages. Currently, she is a research fellow at the University of Tartu and a postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University.

Karl Pajusalu is Professor of Estonian dialectology and the History of the Estonian language at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and Docent of the Finnic languages at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has studied phonological and morphological variation of Southern Finnic and other Finno-Ugric languages, their areal contacts, language dynamics, and sociolinguistics. Karl Pajusalu is a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences.

Authors

• Miina Norvik, University of Tartu / Uppsala University

• Karl Pajusalu, University of Tartu