Linguistic Variation in the Province of Satakunta in the 21st Century

Sapu*, a sociolinguistic research project at the University of Turku, started in 2007. Since the beginning the goal of the project was to study the current dialects, regional and social variation around the province of Satakunta, which is one of the historical provinces and administrative units in Finland. Yet, dialectically the province is divided into two; the dialectal boundary between 1) the Southwestern Dialects and 2) the Dialects of Häme and the Transitional Dialects is traditionally considered one of the most distinctive in Finland. The project was funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Turku University Foundation.

To create a representative overview of current linguistic situation, an extensive corpus of data from the people living along the historical dialect border was recorded 2007–2013 and 2016–2019 (262 hours of recordings, of which 213 hours has been transcribed). This dataset consists of these recordings and transcriptions. However, there is also grammatically (lemmatized, morphologically and syntactically annotated) annotated Sapu corpus available. The annotated Sapu corpus consists of 36 units (six informants representing different age cohorts from six selected dialects).

*Sapu is the abbreviation for Satakuntalaisuus puheessa (’Satakunta in the Speech’) the Finnish name of the project. The official name for the project in English is "Linguistic Variation in the Province of Satakunta in the 21st Century"