Project leader: Matti Miestamo, project members: Markus Juutinen, Eino Koponen, Tuomas Koukkari, Auli Oksanen, Andrei Dumitrescu.
The Skolt Saami Documentation project aims at producing an annotated digital corpus of the Skolt Saami language: The Skolt Saami Documentation Corpus (SSDC). Skolt Saami is an eastern Saami language, currently spoken by 200-300 people in the municipality of Inari in northeastern Finland. The language is considered to be severely endangered. Various revitalization activities are, however, taking place, including language nests, in which pre-school children learn the language from their grandparents’ generation who still speak the language. There is an urgent need for documentary material for the purposes of both research and revitalization.
The sound files for the materials annotated and archived in the Skolt Saami documentation project come from the archives of the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). The recordings date mainly from the 1960-1970’s and from 2007-2009. They consist mainly of narratives and inteviews and contain a lot of cultural and historical information. The corpus produced in the project features the following types of annotations: transcription, translation (into Finnish and English), parts-of-speech analysis, and interlinear glosses (following the Leipzig Glossing Rules). The material is annotated in ELAN, where the soundtrack and annotations can be combined and time-synchronized.
Some 20 hours of annotated material have been archived by the project in Kielipankki (The Language Bank of Finland) https://www.kielipankki.fi; direct link to the Skolt Saami Documentation Corpus in the metashare interface: http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2014073037.