New Academy of Finland Project for Professor Hannu Toivonen

The Academy is funding Professor Toivonen with €370,000, and his project partners, Martti Vainio from the University of Helsinki and Markku Turunen from the University of Tampere will receive their own funding. The project will go on for four years (1 Jan 2016-31 Dec 2019).

 

Summary:

Digital language typology (DLT) is a multi-disciplinary project intending to produce a computer-based platform that will be able to assess the structurally manifested family relationships within any set of languages with appropriate large digital textual and speech material. To this end, we have collected a group of specialists from phonetics, linguistics, and computer science. The project focuses on comparing several Uralic languages with (Indo-European) languages that are most relevant to their evolution in terms of geographical distribution and history of language contact. In addition to relatively well studied Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian, we will include three much less resourced Samoyedic languages, namely Tundra and Forest Nenets and Nganasan, with distinct phylogenetic history. As such the project will provide the research community with new tools and shed new light on the linguistic history of mankind and advance the new field of Digital Humanities.