Photo: Hilla Reiniharju
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Markus Juutinen, PhD student of the University of Oulu, tells us about his research on the Skolt Saami Documentation Corpus (2016) that is available in Kielipankki.
I’m Markus Juutinen, Master of Arts of the University of Helsinki, where I majored in Finno-Ugric Linguistics. At the moment I’m a PhD student of Saami languages at the University of Oulu. In my forthcoming doctoral dissertation I focus on Skolt Saami language contacts.
In my Master’s thesis I look into the use of Skolt Saami affirmative and negative scalaric focus particles conveying the meaning of “too”, “also” and “neither”, “not … either”, as well as into their changes under the influence of language contacts. I was especially interested in how the loss of contact with Russian and the new Skolt Saami – Finnish bilingualism influence these structures.
For my material I use both folklore texts collected in the beginning of the 20th century, and interviews conducted on the Finnish side in the 1970s as well as in 2007. The spoken Skolt Saami material is from the Skolt Saami Documentation Corpus (2016), to the creation of which I contributed myself as a research assistant. The corpus contains almost 20 hours of recorded speech, its transcriptions, translations into Finnish and English, part of speech annotation as well as the glosses of each word. Some of the recordings lack one or two tiers.
The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.
All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive.
