Språkdokumentasjon innen fennistikken og kvensk

Abstract

The study of the Finnish language – called Fennistics – was focused on collecting Finnish dialect material from very early on. During the 19th century interest in studying dialects was governed by the idea that dialects could be used to develop modern written Finnish. However, gradually the study of dialects also became an area of study in its own right. Collecting material on Kven dialects belonged to the larger project of Fennistic materials collection from the very beginning. Therefore, many Kven dialect materials can be found in Finnish dialect archives. The documentation which resulted from dialect collections gathered via the field of Fennistics have been used in the process of revitalizing Kven. In this article, language documentation is defined to be an activity which also includes traditional dialectology. By contrast, documentary linguistics is a field of linguistics established in the 1990s which focuses on revitalizing endangered languages. The difference between language documentation in the Fennistic tradition and documentation of endangered languages in the field of documentary linguistics today is also discussed.