New version of the digitized Dialect Atlas of Finnish by Lauri Kettunen

This package includes alternative representations of the digitized version of Lauri Kettunen's Dialect Atlas of Finnish (Kettunen 1940). The first version of the digitized data was prepared by profs. Sheila Embleton and Eric Wheeler (York University). Embleton and Wheeler’s project was funded over many years with substantial funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The data was further curated by Jyri Lehtinen and the BEDLAN team and published as an undocumented version in Finnish in collaboration with the Institute for the Languages of Finland (see http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:csc-kata20151130145346403821). This data format is rather non-transparent with no metadata about the actual linguistic traits or background of the collections.

Here we offer a complete release of the data, including English translations of the linguistic traits and coordinates and polygons of the historical municipalities used in the Atlas. We also provide 26 dialectal variants that were missing from the earlier version of the digitized Atlas.

The alternative representation provided here includes the data formatted as (1) multistate character format and (2) binary character format. Both formats resemble the representation of population genetic data, and are thus easier to apply to population genetic analyses than the representation provided through the Fairdata repository. 

The coordinates of municipalities were calculated based on the locations of the largest or main settlement in each municipality at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (settlement data, Harju 2009; see also Honkola et al. 2018). The polygon data represent Finnish municipality (or parish) boundaries in the 1920s. The digitalization was done by Ilpo Tammi, mainly based on the facsimile of Suomen karttakirja 1920 (Harju 2009) and the Atlas of Finland 1925 (Geographical Society of Finland, 1928, see also Syrjänen et al. 2016). In addition, the Atlases of Finnish ethnic culture (Vuorela, 1976; Sarmela, 1994) were used to identify the historical boundaries for extraterritorial areas linked with Finnish dialects. Note that due to manual georeferencing based on historical paper maps, cartographic uncertainty is embedded in the geometry.

Since we provide data per municipality, and also codes, coordinates and polygon data for municipalities, the data is interoperable with the Digitized Historical Database of Cultural, Economic, Demographic, and Ecological Data of Finland (CEDEDA) and data from previous research (Syrjänen et al. 2016; Honkola et al. 2018, Lynch et al. 2022, Santaharju et al. in revision and Rantanen, Santaharju et al. manuscript) as well as other spatial data over Finland. 

The data has been prepared by the BEDLAN research project (Biological Evolution and the Diversification of Languages), which has conducted research of Kettunen's dialect atlas using population genetic techniques (Syrjänen et al. 2016, Honkola et al. 2018, Santaharju et al. in revision).

Citation: Jenni Santaharju; Kaj Syrjänen; Terhi Honkola; Perttu Seppä; Outi Vesakoski and Unni Leino. 2025: “Data release: Digitized Dialect Atlas of Finnish by Lauri Kettunen”. Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publication 7 (3). https://doi.org/10.5617/dhnbpub.12270. 

kettunen_multistate.csv

This file contains the multistate representation of the data. Here different states are coded as integers representing the different map symbols from Kettunen's original dialect atlas (for an example, see https://kettunen.free.nf/, which provides scans of Kettunen's original atlas map pages by Juha Kuokkala).

Municipality_number

Unique identifier for each data point (municipality).

Municipality_name

Municipality name. These may not be unique, as several municipalities may have the same name.

lon_WGS84

WGS 84 longitude of the municipality centroid.

lat_WGS84

WGS 84 latitude of the municipality centroid.

1a - 213c

Dialect features present on each map page. The integer at the beginning matches the map page in Kettunen's atlas, so e.g. page 1 starts with 1. The letter following the integer represents different overlapping variants within a single map page. Each page number is suffixed with as many different letters as there are overlapping variants on that page; for instance page 1 has at most 3 overlapping variants for any datapoint, so the table includes three columns (1a-1c). The values are either integers (representing different map symbols from Kettunen's map page legends, with 1 being the topmost variant, 2 being the second variant, and so on), "-" (for absent data) or "NA" (for missing data).

kettunen_binary.csv

Municipality_number

Unique identifier for each data point (municipality).

Municipality_name

Municipality name. These may not be unique, as several municipalities may have the same name.

lon_WGS84

WGS 84 longitude of the municipality centroid.

lat_WGS84

WGS 84 latitude of the municipality centroid.

1_2 - 213_16

Dialect features present on each map page. The leftmost integer matches the map page in Kettunen's atlas, so e.g. page 1 starts with 1. The second integer matches the multistate characters found in the cells of kettunen_multistate.csv, and thus reflect the different symbols in Kettunen's map page legends. Again here, 1 represents the topmost box in Kettunen's map page's legend, 2 the second box, and so on. The actual data field contains either 0 (absent), 1 (present) or "NA" (missing).

kettunen_map_explanations.csv

Map number

Unique identifier for each map.

The explanation of the map

Map name and description of the dialect feature.

Level1 - Level5

Hierarchical classification of the dialect feature.

Historical municipality polygon folder

Geospatial dataset containing polygons of the historical municipalities.

References

Embleton, Sheila M. and Eric Wheeler, S. 1997. Finnish dialect atlas for quantitative studies. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 4.99-102. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0929617970859008.

Embleton, Sheila, M. and Eric Wheeler, S. 2000. Computerized dialect atlas of Finnish: Dealing with ambiguity. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 7.227-31. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1076/jqul.7.3.227.4109.

The Geographical Society of Finland. 1928. Atlas of Finland 1925. Helsinki.

Harju, Erkki-Sakari. 2009. Suomen karttakirja 1920 = Kartboken över Finland 1920. Karttakeskus. Helsinki. 2. facsimile ed.

Honkola, Terhi; Kalle Ruokolainen; Kaj Syrjänen; Unni-Päivä Leino; Ilpo Tammi; Niklas Wahlberg and Outi Vesakoski. 2018. Evolution within a Language: Environmental differences contribute to divergence of dialect groups. BMC Evolutionary Biology 18, no. 132. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-018-1238-6.

Kettunen, Lauri. 1940. Suomen Murteet III A. Murrekartasto. Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura. Helsinki.

Santaharju, Jenni; Terhi Honkola; Perttu Seppä; Kaj Syrjänen; Unni Leino and Outi Vesakoski (in revision): Linguistic convergence and its drivers in Finnish dialects.

Sarmela, Matti. 1994. Suomen perinneatlas : Suomen kansankulttuurin kartasto 2. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Helsinki.

Syrjänen, Kaj; Terhi Honkola; Jyri Lehtinen; Antti Leino and Outi Vesakoski. 2016. Applying population genetic approaches within languages: Finnish dialects as linguistic populations. Language Dynamics and Change 6.235-83. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00602002.

Vuorela, Toivo. 1976. Suomen kansankulttuurin kartasto = Atlas of Finnish folk culture 1. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Helsinki.

In version 0.2, the geospatial dataset containing municipality polygons has been updated.