Clustering Lexical Variation of Finnic Languages Based on Atlas Linguarum Fenni­carum

Abstract

The article focuses on lexical relations of the Finnic languages. Here we studied whether lexical data is suitable for detecting the coarse-grained and fine-grained substructure within the Finnic group. We evaluated this by clustering old lexical variation from a dialectal dataset covering the whole Finnic speaker area (Atlas Linguarum Fennicarum; ALFE) using quantitative methods adopted from population genetics, and by comparing our results to groups suggested by earlier linguistic literature. We found the main lexical division between north-eastern and south-western Finnic. According to our lexical analysis, the Finnic languages are Finnish, North Estonian, South Estonian, Livonian, Karelian, Veps, and Votic-Ingrian. These groups matched well with the earlier suggested divisions, and we concluded that lexical data could be utilised more often in defining linguistic sub-structures, especially in linguistic situations that involve dialect continua.