Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

This chapter introduces the rest of the book by rapidly surveying the names of the Uralic languages and their speakers’ numbers, as well as discussing the relative size and age of the family and its nine branches. It outlines the prehistory of these branches and then goes on to sketch in outline the phonological and lexicogrammatical features that the editors think most interesting, problematic, suggestive, and instructive. The reader should come away from reading this chapter with an understanding of the four kinds of information contained in the rest of the book. These are (i) how and which speech sounds are used (vowels and vowel harmony, stress, consonants, and consonant gradation); (ii) how nouns and verbs change their shapes in sentences—case, number, and predestination (in nouns) and tense, mood, and object indexing (in verbs); (iii) how words are put together to make clauses and complex sentences; and (iv) how new words are made (derivation and compounding). The chapter also introduces the more important theoretical conventions that the editors have found most useful in characterizing Uralic languages. To make the chapter accessible to as wide as possible a readership, most of the terminology used is cast in a basic linguistic theory framework. 

The Uralic Languages, second edition, is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Uralic family.

The Uralic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from Dalarna County in Sweden to Dudinka, Taimyr, Russia. There are currently approximately 50 languages in the group, the largest one among them being the state languages Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian; other Uralic languages covered in the book are South Saami, Skolt Saami, Võro, Moksha Mordvin, Mari, Udmurt, Zyrian Komi, Mansi, Khanty, Nganasan, Forest and Tundra Enets, Nenets, and Selkup. The book also contains a chapter on Finnic languages, the reconstruction of Uralic, the history of Uralic studies, connections of Uralic to other language families, and language names, demographics, and degrees of endangerment. This second and thoroughly revised edition updates and augments the authoritative accounts of the first edition and reflects recent and ongoing developments in linguistics and the languages themselves, as well as our further enhanced understanding of the relations and patterns of influence between them. Each chapter combines modern linguistic analysis and documentary linguistics; a relatively uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages.

Written by an international team of experts, The Uralic Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, folklore, and Siberian studies.

In language contact situations indefinite pronouns are susceptible to borrowing and/or calquing, and Livonian, which has been under strong influence of Latvian, is no exception. The negative prefixoid äb, originally the third person singular of the negative auxiliary äb, and calqued on Latvian ne- NEG, has been used to form nouns (e.g., äbkūlzit NEG.obedience ‘disobedience’), adjectives (e.g., äbjõvā NEG.good ‘bad’) and adverbs (e.g., äbknaššõ NEG.nicely ‘nastily’), but in a number of 19th century sources one also finds indefinite pronouns with this same negative prefixoid, e.g., a̤b midāgid ‘nothing’. However, due to the synchronous identity of äb as a tensed negative auxiliary (present tense: äb, past tense: iz), in past tense clauses the negative prefixoid of indefinite pronouns was then also inflected, leading to forms such as is midāgid. For a brief period in the 19th century Livonian therefore had a tensed negative pronominal construction.

The present article takes another look at the Mansi diminutive ‑riś~‑rəś, considers why there has been some unclarity surrounding the status of this element in many grammars of Mansi, takes note of some recent (and not so recent) literature on the diminutive in general, reflects on some ensuing implications for the description of the diminutive in Mansi, as well as on some Uralic (and Ewen) implications for Daniel Jurafsky’s universal structure for the semantics of the diminutive, and finally has a brief look at augmentatives in Uralic and Ewen.

In this paper we analyse an epic song, performed by Ulita Koskova in 1966 in Kolva in the Komi ASSR, and recorded by the Hungarian-Australian researcher Erik Vászolyi, and discuss its background and wider historical context. We look at different ways how such material can contribute to data-driven and sociolinguistically oriented research, specifically in connection to contemporary documentary linguistics, and point to directions for further research.

The articles in this volume have been written by colleagues, friends and students of Virve and Raimo Raag on the occasion of Raimo's retirement in 2020 and Virve's in 2021. The book celebrates their long and productive careers as teachers and scholars of Estonian language and culture at Uppsala University.

Blomqvist Tündének a svédországi magyar szépirodalomról szóló könyve hetven év (1945-2015) kiadványait öleli fel. Magukon a műveken túl azonban izgalmas azt is megvizsgálni, hogy a magyar származású svédországi írók milyen stratégiákat használnak a nyelvváltással, identitásukkal, publikációs csatornák választásával kapcsolatban, ezért a szerző nemcsak a magyar nyelvű alkotásokat veszi számba, hanem a magyar származású írók könyveit nyelvtől függetlenül. A függelék a szépírók betűrendes jegyzékét tartalmazza, életrajzi adatokkal, valamint a migrációjuk után publikált műveik felsorolásával kiegészítve.

The aim of this thesis is to map and analyse literature written by authors with a Hungarian-language background who moved to Sweden between 1945 and 2015, and who have published literary works in book format. From the perspective of the sociology of literature, this thesis focuses on publishing channels and possibilities, the authors’ and their works places in the literary value system and feed-back in the form of reviews, but also choice of language, theme, and genre. The approach of the research for this thesis is new in Hungarian and Swedish literary studies, as the literary works are analysed irrespective of the language in which they are written. The research corpus consists of both Hungarian and Swedish literary works and one book in English.

The second chapter presents the research that Hungarian researchers have conducted on Hungarian migration literature and offers an overview of the questions and results arising from this research.

The authors with a Hungarian-language background in Sweden were divided into four groups, based on the time of their migration to Sweden. Four chapters, which comprise the analytic part of the thesis, present and analyse the author groups and their literary activities regarding language, purpose of any code-switching, chosen theme, and genre. The first group consists of authors who migrated to Sweden during the decade after the Second World War (1945–1955). The second group came between 1956 and 1958 in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The third group consists of Hungarians who moved to Sweden during the communist era, between 1959 and 1989. Finally, the fourth group came after the fall of communism (1990–2015). As many as half of the authors chose either Hungarian or Swedish as their language and there are surprisingly few authors working in both languages. The publishing channels depend on the literary works language and theme, and only half of the books have been published at established publishers.

The literary works of these authors are categorized as Swedish-Hungarian migration literature. Literary history works until now have neglected these type of literatures, but it is imperative that the study of literature finds a way to acknowledge, include, position, and group them.

The Unicode Standard, in its various iterations, aims to provide and guarantee consistent, transparent and reliable encoding for the totality of all codified human writing systems. How successful these aims have been in practice greatly depends on the support individual languages and varieties enjoy in politics and infrastructures. This contribution looks at the realities of the digital and print realization of Uralic minority languages, especially Mansi, in the past and today. Based on interviews and the study of surviving digital files, it aims to make knowledge held by relevant scholars accessible to a broader audience.

Loanwords carry information on linguistic interactions, and can also reveal (pre-)historicalpopulation contacts. The contact history of a particular language family is an essential component of historical linguistics, but it is also illuminating for integrative studies of the human past. However, data availability and the time-consuming nature of etymology mean that comprehensive research on loanword layers exists for relatively few languages, forcing us to rely on limited material for others. This paper compares the loanword layers in the basic and total vocabulary of six well-studied Uralic languages, assessing how accurately the borrowing profile in basic vocabulary reflects the full profile of a language. We define “borrowing profile” as the known contact history of a language reflected by its loanword layers. We demonstrate that the loanword layers in basic vocabulary provide an adequate cross-section of the full borrowing profile, although basic vocabulary manifests prehistoric contacts more strongly than more recent contacts.