Kone Foundation grants EUR 6 million for language programme

Donation fixes gap caused by state spending cuts

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The Kone Foundation has granted a total of EUR 6 million in funding for a language programme aimed at supporting the documentation and status of the Finno-Ugric languages and Finnish minority languages.
      “Securing linguistic diversity is the most unambiguous way to try to maintain the full array of world views”, says the deputy chair of the Kone Foundation, Ilona Herlin, who has a doctorate in the Finnish language.
     
The Kone Foundation pledged money already in the autumn for the production of a dictionary of Old Finnish. The work was started already in the 1970s, but was suspended for lack of funding. Two volumes of what is to be a six-part dictionary had already appeared before the funding stopped. Now the third is expected to come out this year.
      Spources for the dictionary includes the glossary of Mikael Agricola, old legal texts, as well as the first Finish-language bible dating back to 1642. The book is to contain information on the etymology of words, the development of sentence structures, as well as theology, law, and history of ideologies of the age of Swedish rule in Finland.
     
In the view of Pirkko Nuolijärvi, the director of the Institute for the Languages of Finland, the Kone Foundation’s language programme is “an incredibly magnificent investment”.
      A pilot project for a dictionary of the dialects of Finnish, with between 5,000 and 6,000 entries, is to appear on line on the 28th of February, which is Kalevala Day. The day commemorates the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.
     


Links:
  Kone Foundation Language Programme 2012-2016
  Institute for the Languages of Finland

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