Rajakarjalainen kuuntelutesti: havainnoijina suomen kielen yliopisto-opiskelijat
Border Karelian recognition test: University students of Finnish language as observers

Summary/Abstract: The study uses a folk-linguistic recognition task to investigate how well students of Finnish language at Finnish universities recognize a sample of Border Karelian dialect. The Karelian language (once spoken in the Border Kareli the region in the easternmost corner of pre-war Finland) is severely endangeredand most Finns have never heard Karelian spoken publicly. Te test confirms the presumption that the Border Karelian dialect is not familiar to university students. The respondents were allowed to make one or more guesses about the origin of the test sample. More than a half of the 337 respondents placed the sample in the eastern parts of Finland, one third in the Savo region, an fifth in Northern Finland and a tenth in South-Eastern Finland. About 15% of the students recognized the sample as Karelian; Karelian was best recognized by the students of the University of Eastern Finland. Some respondents commented on the foreignness of the sample and connected it with Russian in particular. Te linguistic features frequently mentioned include the diphthongization of aa and ää, non-Finnish sibilants and the Karelian affricate, word-final h and palatalized consonants; the respondents seemed to locate the speaker on the basis of these features. Even though the terminology used by the students proved to be partly different from the metalanguage of Finnish non-linguists, the linguistic descriptions also contained folk and colloquial expressions.

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