Lähivertailujen alkuvaiheita
Finnish-Estonian Close Comparisons: How the story began

Summary/Abstract: The year 2015 marks the 30th anniversary of the first Finnish-Estonian collection of articles with the title Lähivertailuja (‘Close Comparisons’). A publication series of a rare kind ensued: the Lähivertailuja volumes have since then appeared within the proceedings of six Finnish and two Estonian universities.Nowadays, the series has a bilingual title (Lähivõrdlusi. Lähivertailuja) and it is published by the Estonian Association for Applied Linguistics. This volume is already the 25th.This paper takes a closer look at the intensification of the cooperation between Finnish and Estonian linguists in the 1980s, following the silent postwar years. At those times, a new research project on comparing the grammars of Finnish and Estonian was launched. The project worked on two main sectors:1) contrastive studies on the structure of Finnish and Estonian, and 2) analysisof errors in connection with diffculties in language learning. Within the project,Finnish-Estonian seminars were organized in both countries. In Finland,those universities in which the Estonian language was taught have since 1983 organised error analysis seminars, in which the Finnish-Estonian linguistic relations were dealt with from both theoretical and practical points of view, also on the basis of material on learner errors which language lecturers had collected during the academic year. The first Lähivertailuja collection appeared in 1985,was edited by the author of this paper and based on proceedings from a seminar hosted by the University of Joensuu. In the first years, papers for the Lähivertailuja collections were mainly written by Estonian lecturers working in Finland and Finnish contrastive linguists, and the publications were of a fairly modest size. From 1989 on, the error analysis seminars were renamed to contrastive seminars. After the restoration of Estonia’s independence, the number of participants at these meetings grew significantly, and article submissions for the Lähivertailuja series have increased both in number and in scope.

• Details
• Contents