Norwegian version of this page

The Ruija Corpus

The Ruija Corpus is a speech corpus from Kven and Finnish-speaking areas in Northern Norway. The corpus contains nearly 522 000 words.

Photo: Vilfred Ingilæ

In April 2005 Norway got a new official minority language – Kven was recognised as a language. The Ruija Corpus consists of recordings of interviews, and it is the first on-line corpus of the Kven language. The recordings were made in Kven and Finnish-speaking areas between 1960 and 2014; old recordings have been transcribed and new data were gathered. The search interface of the corpus is Glossa which is designed by the Text Laboratory.

The data come from three research projects, lead by Dr. Pia Lane at  the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo.


LICHEN – The Linguistic and Cultural Heritage Electronic Network
LICHEN was one of the Norwegian research projects financed by the Research Council of Norway financed as a part of the International Polar Year. The project is a part of a larger network focusing on minority languages in the circumpolar region, coordinated by the University of Oulu. The partners of the Norwegian LICHEN-project are the University of Oulu, the University of Tromsø and Kvensk Institutt/Kainun Institutti. The interviews from 2007 were carried out as a part of the LICHEN-project.

Link to the LICHEN-projects webpage


Identities in Transition: A Longitudinal Study of Language Shift in a Kven Community, a post doctoral research project financed by the Research Council of Norway
In 1975 69 people in Bugøynes were interviewed by Finnish ethnologists. In 2009 11 of these were re-interviewed by the project’s Finnish field assistant, and the corpus has data from the same individuals interviewed 35 years apart. In addition, younger people who do not speak Kven were interviewed by a Norwegian-speaking assistant.


Standardising Minority Languages – STANDARDS
The project investigated sociopolitical aspects of the standardisation minority languages, with a particular focus on the role of users in these processes and how users accept, resist and reject aspects of standardisation. The aim of the project was to investigate how intended users of the Kven written standard relate to the Kven standard, and speakers were interviewed and filmed when reading texts in Kven.


Access to data
To get access to the Ruija Corpus, please send an email to professor Pia Lane with your name, affiliation and a brief description of what you intend to use the corpus for, i.e., what research question(s) the material is needed for, and whether the investigation(s) will be part of a dissertation or course work.

When your application is granted you can login with Feide or CLARIN (or ask tekstlab-post@iln.uio.no to get a local login alternative).

 

Search the corpus

 

Published Mar. 2, 2011 9:33 AM - Last modified Aug. 11, 2023 10:48 AM