The National Library of Finland is conducting since 2012 until late 2016 a major digitization project on the cultural heritage of Finno-Ugric minorities:
“The project will produce digitized materials in the Uralic languages as well as their development tools to support linguistic research and citizen science. The resulting materials will constitute the largest resource for the Uralic languages in the world. Through this project, researchers will gain access to corpora which they have not been able to study before and to which all users will have open access regardless of their place of residence.”
The “Project of Kindred Languagues” receives funding from the Kone Foundation Language Program with the main objective “to promote the documentation of small Finno-Ugrian languages, Finnish and Finland’s minority languages as well as to strengthen their status and accessibility.” Cooperation partners are among others the National Library of Russia (St. Petersburg) – which is contributing with its material collections – and for the digitization of texts in Livonian the Institute of Estonian Language (Tallinn). For properly presenting the digitized materials, the National Library established the Fenno-Ugrica Collection with presently more than 1.100 monographies and over 100 newspaper titles in 17 languages:
- Mordvinic (Erzya, Moksha)
- Permic (Udmurt, Komi-Permyak, Komi-Zyrian)
- Mari (Meadow and Hill Mari)
- Samoyedic (Selkup, Nenets)
- Ob-Ugric (Khanty, Mansi)
- Baltic Finnic (Karelian, Livonian, Veps and Ingrian)
- Sami (Skolt Sami)
For an overview on the vast geographical dispersion of these languages, please have a look on the following linguistic map:
(Map by İhsan Yılmaz Bayraktarlı and Maximilian Dörrbecker)
To follow the current digitization progress, the project manager Jussi-Pekka Hakkarainen has founded an informative blog with substantial coverage on the various issues of presenting and digitizing the minority heritage.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Albert Weber (February 12, 2016). Digitization project on textual materials of Finno-Ugric population groups. Minorities Records. Retrieved March 16, 2025 from https://minorecs.hypotheses.org/362