Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen (FUF) is an international peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles on Uralic (Finno-Ugric) languages and peoples, as well as book reviews and discussions. FUF has been published since 1901, and it was originally founded to fill in a gap in the discourse between Uralicists and Indo-Europeanists. From 2019 on, FUF is an open-access journal, and from 2020, the journal is published annually. The volumes 1–29 can be accessed at the Fenno-Ugrica collection of the National Library of Finland, whereas the volumes 30–52 and 61–68 are available at journal.fi/fuf. The volumes 53–60 can currently be accessed at the Elektra service and will be published on this site in the near future. Some of the digitized materials could not be published for online open access since the copyright holders were not reached. If you know how to reach a copyright holder who is holding rights to materials that are missing from this site, please contact toimisto@sgr.fi. Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen welcomes original scholarly contributions on research into the Uralic languages and the culture of the Uralic peoples (ethnology, folkloristics, mythology, archaeology). However, studies focusing narrowly on the three major national languages Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian or their speakers and cultures are usually directed to other forums specialized on these topics. Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen follows a bilateral anonymous peer review procedure for scientific articles, in which both the writer and the reviewer remain anonymous throughout the review process. Book reviews and overviews in FUF are processed internally by the editors and can be published without a scientific quality evaluation. Suggested research articles for publication shall be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief (jussi.ylikoski@utu.fi). Manuscripts must be written in English or German. The recommended length of articles is 40 000–80 000 characters (with spaces; including footnotes and the bibliography). If you wish to submit a shorter or longer manuscript, please contact the editor in advance. Statements on the scientific suitability for publication of manuscripts will be requested from at least two persons invited to review them. The reviewers are researchers who have defended their PhDs, are outside of the group of editors and are neutral with respect to the manuscript under review. The reviewers evaluate the scope of the research data, the researcher's mastery of the theoretical framework, the reliability and accuracy of the research as well as the distinctiveness and novelty value of the research in relation to earlier research (see https://www.tsv.fi/en/services/label-for-peer-reviewed-scholarly-publications/requirements-for-use). Each reviewer presents a statement on the rejection of the suggestion for publication or its acceptance as is, or with the indicated changes. Based on the statements, the Editor-in-Chief makes the decision on publishing the manuscript. A notification of the acceptance or rejection of the suggestion for publication will be sent to the authors, along with any suggested changes to the manuscript required for publication and the statements of the reviewers. The main information and documents related to the review process for all manuscripts accepted for review will be archived. For peer reviewed but rejected manuscripts, the authors' names mentioned in the suggestion for publication, the title of the manuscript and the names of the reviewers will be archived. For published manuscripts, the suggestion for publication, the statements sent by the reviewers and the decisions sent by the editors to the authors regarding publication will be stored. The archived information is confidential.
Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura / Société Finno-Ougrienne / Finno-Ugrian Society / Finnisch-Ugrische Gesellschaft
In defense of the Festschrift: Unearthing “article graves”
As a genre of publication, the Festschrift (see §1 as to the definition of this concept and difficulties in delimiting it) has, in my experience, come into disrepute in recent years, in Finno-Ugric/Uralic Studies and beyond. Categorically excluded from many funding frameworks for scientific publications and treated as an anachronistic concept, there are a number of legitimate points of criticism to make against the entire genre, which will be discussed in §2. In spite of these, I have come to appreciate this genre of publication and believe it serves important functions in our discipline, as will be discussed in §3. Critically, I will present the recent online publication at https://lidivoka.univie.ac.at of an expandable compendium of Finno-­Ugric Festschriften with their tables of contents within the LIDIVOKA “Linguistic Diversity in the Volga-Kama Region” bibliographical database which, with its currently (as of 15 October 2025) 10,870 entries, is among other things an endeavour to create an exhaustive bibliographical database of edited volumes in our discipline (§4). Subsequently, I will introduce an overview of what it currently covers in the domain of Festschriften and Festschrift-adjacent publications (§5) which is published as an online appendix. Finally, I will implore the reader to assist me in countering the “digital invisibility” of essential publications in our discipline (§6), and will voice some ideas as to how we can carry the concept of the Festschrift forward into the future in a more timely fashion (§7).
Copyright (c) 2025 Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen
An areal-etymological approach to semantic reconstruction of Proto-Uralic kin terms
Languages vary in how they order their kin terms. Kin terms and systems in Uralic languages have changed considerably over time, which has caused challenges for the reconstruction of Proto-Uralic kin terms. There are terms that cannot be reconstructed altogether, terms that can be fairly reliably reconstructed both phonologically and semantically, and terms that, while being easily reconstructed phonologically, exhibit semantic variation that is difficult to interpret. In this paper, we focus on the last-mentioned group and aim to reconstruct the most accurate meanings of certain selected Proto-Uralic kin terms. In our view contact has been the most significant factor driving change – especially structural change – in Uralic kinship terminology. In this paper, we consider both the present and historical contact situations of different Uralic branches and peel away the secondary contact-induced changes in their kinship patterns before attempting to reconstruct the meaning of the terms in Proto-Uralic. Alongside this we have also carried out an etymological examination of the terms. We call our method the areal-etymological approach to semantic reconstruction. With our approach we found that the most parsimonious semantic reconstructions for PU *čečä, *ekä, and *koska are ‘parent’s younger brother’, ‘parent’s elder brother’, and ‘parent’s elder sister’, respectively. A thorough examination of the reconstructed Proto-Uralic kin terms as a whole also revealed that relative age distinction was a salient general feature already in Proto-Uralic kinship terminology. Our study showcases how by delving into an old question with a fresh approach, one can shed light on the distant past of the Uralic languages.
Migrations from the west, south, and east shaped the Proto-Finnic ethnos
This article deals with migrations to the area of what is today Estonia from the late second millennium to the late first millennium BC, as revealed by archaeological material. This was the era in which the Proto-Finnic people, language, and culture were shaped and developed. At least five immigration episodes originated from the western direction and are associated with (1) early block-shaped fields starting from the period 1400–1200 BC, (2) stone-cist graves in northern Estonia starting from 1200 BC, (3) stone cairn graves in southern Estonia from the period 1200–1000 BC, (4) ship settings, and (5) fine-grained ceramics and possibly bronze casting in fortified settlements (ca. 850–500 BC). All these groups from the west and southwest spoke some kind of Indo-European, probably Paleo- or Proto-Germanic. These migrations were accompanied by one more coming from the south, from the middle and lower reaches of the Dnieper River, ca. 1000 BC (temple ornaments of Belogrudovka-type). At least four major episodes of West Uralic-speaking immigration originated from the eastern forest zone: (1) primary pioneer settlement with SW-Tapiola group of pottery, starting from the period ca. 1200–1000 BC, (2) people of fortified settlements from the ninth century BC onward, (3) builders of early tarand cemeteries from the sixth and fifth centuries BC, and (4) users of shepherd’s crook pins and pottery with cord and comb decoration (ca. 300 BC). While Baltic loans in Proto-Finnic were acquired on the route to the west, mainly in the upper Dnieper and Daugava region, and most abundantly during the last immigration episode, closer interaction with the speakers of Germanic apparently began in coastal Estonia around the 10th–9th centuries BC and lasted until the beginning of the Pre-Roman Iron Age. Then, the construction of new stone-cist graves ceased, new migrations associated with the Germanic groups no longer took place, and the material culture was unified. All this should testify to the end of assimilation processes and the development of the early Proto-Finnic ethnos during the third quarter of the first millennium BC.
Encoding discontinuativity by Mari retrospectivizing particle constructions
Discontinuativity is a rarely discussed subcategory of event modality. It marks an event whose circumstantial modal base allows it to continue in so-called inertia worlds outside the actual one, but which eventually fails to do so. This paper analyzes the discontinuative functions of constructions based on the retrospectivizing particles ə̑lˊe and ə̑lˊə̑ in Meadow Mari and Hill Mari, respectively. Though the particle constructions primarily express location of an event in a temporal sphere, I shall present how their perspective properties may also encode a modal perspective towards events in different worlds. A corpus study distinguishes two subtypes of discontinuativity based on the TAME interpretation of the lexical verb in the construction: (1) temporal discontinuatives, which indicate a realized interruption in the normal advancement of an event and (2) modal discontinuatives, which indicate that an interruption might follow. In both types, the constructions mark that the modal evaluation world is detached from the actual world and shifted to the unactualized inertia world, which produces an overt comment on the unexpected or unpreferred arrest of an event. This is a semantic reanalysis of the temporal perspective structure of the constructions, which detaches the perspective time from the utterance time.
The language-contact landscape in the Baltics during the first millennium BC
It is well known that Finnic obtained a large number of loanwords from both Germanic and Baltic, and inferences about the nature of these contacts and the lives of the people speaking these languages have been made based on the existing loanword material. In this paper we go deeper into the topic via a novel combination of three aspects. First, we divided Finnic into the stages Early, Middle, and Late Proto-Finnic and focused specifically on Germanic and Baltic loanwords in Early and Middle Proto-Finnic as those were most likely the languages spoken in the Baltic region during the first millennium BC. Second, by focusing on this early loanword material we combined linguistic and archaeological evidence around three themes: 1) agriculture, 2) bronzeworking and its implications, and 3) family life. We found a surprisingly coherent group of Germanic loanwords related to bronze casting, and we propose that the speakers of both Germanic and Finnic were living in fortified settlements and participated in the bronze-casting business. The connections between Finnic and Baltic were more familial as indicated by the borrowing of several kinship terms. Third, we considered the language-contact situation in the Baltics as a whole, i.e. we also discussed what we know or might be able to know about loanwords from Finnic into Baltic and Germanic and between Germanic and Baltic. All in all, through a multidisciplinary approach we were able to gain new insights into the well-studied topic of the Finnic past, showing that more of this kind of research is needed in the future.
This paper seeks to establish a new etymology for the Mari word meaning ‘god’ and ‘sky’: Eastern Mari jumo and Western Mari jǝ̑mǝ̑, reconstructed as Proto-Mari *jŭmǝ. This noun has traditionally been connected to the Finnic word for ‘god’ (Finnish jumala, Estonian jumal, etc.) within a well-established Uralic etymological framework. However, this study challenges the conventional view, arguing instead that Proto-Mari *jŭmǝ originated from Proto-­Uralic *jilma ‘sky’. If correct, this would align the Mari noun with cognates such as Finnish ilma ‘air’, North Saami albmi ‘sky’, and Komi jen ‘god’. The paper critically evaluates the arguments supporting the traditional etymology, identifying a previously overlooked morphological issue. Subsequently, it presents detailed evidence in favor of the proposed alternative etymology, aiming to establish a more robust connection between the Mari word and its hypothesized Proto-Uralic origins.
Nachträgliche Bemerkungen, 1. Weitere Anmerkungen zu einer lappischen Dialektkarte, 2. Fragen des tscheremissischen Vokalismus
Copyright (c) 2024 Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen
Some notes on The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages
Besprechung Bakró-Nagy, Marianne & Laakso, Johanna & Skribnik, Elena (eds․). 2022. The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages. Oxford University Press. LV + 1115 pp.
P. Katara, I. Schellbach-Kopra, Suomalais-saksalainen suursanakirja.
Eine Beobachtung über die Gründe der raschen Veränderung des Grundwortschatzes im Lappischen
The origin and development of the Nganasan indicative aorist perfect
This paper addresses the origin and development of the Nganasan indicative aorist markers. The system of Nganasan aorist marking, with its obligatory marking of lexical aspect through the selection of suffixes, is unique among the Samoyed languages, and the aorist suffixes themselves lack direct cognates in finite verbal paradigms outside Nganasan. The present paper asserts that the Nganasan markers of the indicative aorist have developed from Proto-­Samoyed deverbal forms via the process of refinitization, also known as verbalization, a common way of creating new finite paradigms in languages of northern Eurasia. Cognates for the Nganasan aorist suffixes can be found among the derivational forms of other Samoyed languages, and traces pointing towards their deverbal origin prevail in Nganasan as well. In parallel to the Nganasan imperfective aorist suffixes -NTU, -U, previously suggested to have originated in imperfective participles, I claim that the perfective aorist suffix -qe/-qa has likewise developed from a deverbal form, the modern cognates of which are found in the augmentative suffixes of northern Samoyed languages. The diverse patterns of aorist formation in Samoyed, as well as the largely opaque morphophonological alternations affecting the suffixes in Nganasan, suggest that the tense system of Proto-Samoyed was going through major changes exactly during the breakup of the common proto-language.
Vocabulary related to iron manufacture and iron-working in Saami languages
In this article, etymologies of the lexical set related to iron manufacture and iron-working in the Saami languages are examined. The aim is to examine, from a linguistic perspective, when Saami speakers started to manufacture and work iron and from which direction they learned these activities. The data consists of 32 words relating to iron. Only the most central terms of the lexical set have been included, namely terms for ‘iron’; ‘steel’; ‘ore’; ‘iron slag’; ‘forge (v.)’; ‘forge (n.), smithy’; ‘furnace’; ‘smith’; ‘coal; ember’; ‘bellows’; ‘pliers’; ‘hammer’; ‘anvil’. The data was collected from dictionaries of the Saami languages. According to the data analysis, it seems that Saami speakers received their iron-related vocabulary mainly from two directions: Proto-Scandinavian and Finnic/Finnish. The southwestern Saami languages which are today spoken in central Scandinavia and Lule Saami received the vocabulary mainly from Proto-Scandinavian. The more northern and northeastern languages have borrowed words from Finnic/Finnish.
Are there Proto-Slavic loanwords in Saami?
There are two nouns in Saami languages for which Proto-Slavic loan etymologies have been proposed: Proto-Saami *multtē ‘soap’ and *kuompe̮r ‘mushroom’, allegedly borrowed from Proto-Slavic *mỳdlo ‘soap’ and *gǫba ‘mushroom, fungus’. Both etymologies are critically analyzed, and in the process, new etymologies for several other Saami words are also proposed. It is suggested that the two Slavic loan etymologies are examples of the largely overlooked phenomenon of “chance correspondence”: although the matches between the Saami and the Slavic words are phonologically regular and semantically transparent, they nevertheless very probably result from sheer coincidence. The word *multtē ‘soap’ is showed to have an alternative and far more probable Proto-Norse loan etymology, and the Slavic etymology of the word *kuompe̮r turns out to be weak because it does not account for the stem-final consonant *r. This result entails a valuable methodological lesson: in addition to “chance similarities” between languages, there are also “chance correspondences” between them – that is, words that show a regular phonological and semantic match by pure coincidence. Although the latter are much rarer than the former, they nevertheless seem to be more common than is usually assumed. Because of this, far-reaching conclusions (such as assumptions of contact between two reconstructed proto-languages) should not be based on a mere couple of etymologies, no matter how plausible they may seem superficially.
Copyright (c) 2023 Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen
The article deals with three constructions in Udmurt based on the past participle, combined with the past tense copula (valPST1/vi̮lemPST2). The aim of the study is to describe the functions of the following constructions: 1) the experiential construction + val/vi̮lem, 2) the resultative construction + val/vi̮lem and 3) the past participle + val/vi̮lem. These constructions are examined through the theory of perfects and pluperfects and whether the constructions carry out functions typical of those of a (plu)perfect. The results of the study show that the constructions in question carry out functions typical of pluperfects, such as past relevance perfect, past experiential and counterfactual functions. The construction formed with the past participle is found to be evidentially neutral and by and large corresponding to the first finite remote past, albeit declining in use and stylistically nuanced. The so-called resultative construction, on the other hand, may acquire various meanings depending on the semantics of the verb, among them past resultative action, past relevance perfect, and past continuative. Contrary to previous descriptions, the resultative construction may also occur with an external subject argument. Finally, the constructions also carry out similar discourse-pragmatic functions as their finite counterparts, such as attenuating questions, expressing assertivity, mirativity, and marking a pre-mirative context.
A North Saami dialect dictionary in a new format
Besprechung Skåden, Asbjørg (ed.). 2022. Márkku sánit. Ravda Lágádus. (Android app.)
The largest bidirectional dictionary of North Saami and Swedish to date
Besprechung Svonni, Mikael. 2023. Davvisáme­giela-ruoŧagiela, ruoŧagiela-davvi­sámegiela sátnegirji = Nordsamisk-­svensk, svensk-nordsamisk ordbok. Kiruna: Ravda Lágádus. 503 pp.
Besprechung Honti, László. 2022: Az ősi uráli tárgyragok története és vesszőfutása: Accusatum et expulsum. Budapest: Tinta Könyvkiadó. 283 pp.
Ein Opus magnum der historischen Phraseologie
Besprechung Forgács, Tamás. 2021. Történeti frazeológia: A történeti szólás- és közmondáskutatás kézikönyve [Historische Phraseologie: Handbuch der historischen phraseologischen Forschung] (Segédkönyvek a nyelvészeti tanulmányozásához 218). Budapest: Tinta Könyvkiadó. 476 S.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss some debated etymologies that have competing explanations in Hungarian and in other Uralic languages. It is shown that in most cases quite clearly one of the suggested etymologies is superior and that some phonological details have been neglected in recent discussion of these etymologies. The discussion includes criticism of some recent etymologies that have not yet been commented on elsewhere in detail.
Komi language sustainability in urban Syktyvkar
The article focuses on language sustainability, the functioning of a language in the multiverse of its relations with speakers, non-speakers, other languages, and surrounding environments. Highlighted is the case of the Komi language, approached through the analysis of the language attitudes of Komi and non-Komi residents of Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi Republic, and changes that have affected the language’s role. The empirical data includes interviews with urban Komi, social media posts, and historical and census data. Unlike previous studies, the article demonstrates historical transformations in the language attitudes of urban Komi. Widespread Russification and marginalization have previously spurred the development of negative language attitudes. Increased interregional communication, digitalization, and access to information have influenced later improvements in these attitudes. Changes in the attitudes of non-Komi residents are observed as well: while these attitudes were previously acutely negative, they have been replaced by indifferent and moderately positive ones. The prevalence of positive attitudes was registered in situations where direct interaction with the Komi language was not expected, while direct interaction, such as inclusion of Komi in the school curriculum, triggered more negative reactions. The prevalence of a utilitarian approach to language maintenance and widespread narratives about the Russifying influence of Syktyvkar have negatively affected the sustainability of the Komi language within the city. Simultaneously, the influx of rural-born Komi-speaking youth with positive language attitudes and the presence of places and communities where Komi is used and valued exert a favorable influence on the language.
The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages