| Shortname | Name and metadata | License | Formats | Support level | Contact Person | Resource group and help | Location | Other information |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shortname | Name and metadata | License | Formats | Support level | Contact Person | Resource group and help | Location | Other information |
Samples of contemporary Finnish language variant spoken in Northern California, USA, were collected and documented during the research project Finnish Language Attrition in the USA between 10/2017-11/2018. Participants were Finnish American emigrants (N = 38) who had lived in an English speaking environment for over 20 years. To contrast the participants and enable comparisons at group level a control group of Finnish speakers living in Finland (N = 50) were included. The groups were matched for age, education, and gender.
Background information for the Finnish American emigrants was collected using the sociolinguistic questionnaire (SQ) included in the Language Attrition Test Battery (Schmid, 2011). The SQ comprises of 71 questions, covering numerous self-reports on different aspects of language history, use, attitudes, and affiliations. The complete SQ is available at www.languageattrition.org, including instructions for use and analysis. The author translated the SQ into Finnish, and participants had the choice to complete it in either Finnish or English. For the control group, an abridged version of the questionnaire was used to confirm the use of Finnish in everyday contexts.
Examples of all questionnaires are deposited alongside data derived from the questionnaires. The data are available in spreadsheet format with samples of questionnaires.
To record speech samples, a silent movie clip (a 9-minute 57-second segment from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, 1936) was used to elicit narration following Perdue, 1993. This task was recorded in Finnish and English for the Finnish-American group (Finnish, N = 38, English N = 37) and in Finnish (N = 50) for the group living in Finland. As part of their interview, participants in the Finnish American group were invited to share a short story about their immigration journey as a free speech sample in Finnish. Audio files of these speech samples are deposited from those participants who chose to share their story (N = 38).
Data for the free speech samples are deposited as audio files.
A WUG test was administered to assess the participants’ ability to inflect words in context. The WUG test is a test designed to gauge the knowledge of morphological rules by asking participants to complete sentences using non-words following productive morphological rules (Berko, 1958). An existing Finnish morphology WUG test (Lyytinen, 2003) was used, and additional tasks were generated to cover all grammatical cases in Finnish (total of 15 cases). The test included 90 sentences in total and the sentences were presented in a pseudo-randomized order.
Data for the WUG test is available in Finnish for the Finnish American participant group (N = 38) and the group of Finnish speakers living in Finland (N=50).
Berko, J. (1958). The child’s learning of English morphology. WORD, 14 (2–3), 150–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1958.11659661
Lehtinen, N., Luotonen, I., & Kautto, A. (2021). Systematic administration and analysis of verbal fluency tasks: Preliminary evidence for reliable exploration of processes underlying task performance. Applied Neuropsychology: Adult, 30 (6), 727–739. https://doi.org/10.1080/23279095.2021.1973471
Lyytinen, P. (2003). Morfologiatesti. Taivutusmuotojen hallinnan mittausmenetelmä lapsille. [The Finnish morphology test. An evaluation method for the assessment of morphological inflections for children] 2nd. edition. Jyväskylän yliopistona lapsitutkimuskeskus ja Niilo Mäki Instituutti. Jyväskylän yliopisto.
Perdue, C. (1993). Adult language acquisition: Cross-linguistic perspectives. Cambridge University Press.
Schmid, M. S. (2011). Language attrition. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511852046
For more information about the variables used in the sociolinguistic questionnaire, see here.
This page has a persistent identifier: http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024082921
Last modified on 2026-02-03