Graphization and orthographies of Uralic minority languages

• Main Authors: Laakso, Johanna, Skribnik, Elena
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2022
• Subjects: saami
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198767664.003.0006; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/47094421/oso-9780198767664-chapter-6.pdf

Abstract This chapter provides a concise overview of the standardization of Uralic languages, focusing on the Uralic minority languages and their orthographies. While the first attempts at creating a written form for the Saami languages were prompted by the Reformation in Scandinavia, most Uralic written standards have only come into being in the twentieth century, and in Russia, these processes were typically part of the ambitious ethnopolitics of the early Soviet period. The Saami and Finnic orthographies are mostly Latin-based. In the Soviet Union, alongside Cyrillic or Cyrillic-based alphabets such as the Molodcov alphabet for Komi, Latin-based experimental alphabets were introduced for some Uralic languages in the 1930s; today, most Uralic languages of Russia employ the Cyrillic alphabet, and for representing phonological phenomena unknown to Russian, various orthographic solutions have been developed. The chapter also briefly describes the most important linguistic transcriptions, in particular, the Finno-Ugric Transcription (FUT).