In the article, the development of the Tver’ Karelian dialect is discussed. This new dialect has emerged from a mix of regional dialects of Karelian immigrants from the seventeenth century onwards. Characteristics of a new dialect in Tver’ Karelian are examined on the basis of demographic data and linguistic descriptions. In addition, the unity and internal variation of Tver’ Karelian as well as its relation to other Karelian dialects are taken into consideration. In regard to this kind of comparative study, the article reveals some significant regional shortcomings in the linguistic research material available. A discrepancy could also be found between the areal distribution of certain linguistic features of Tver’ Karelian and the main region of origin indicated by historical documents.

This article provides an overview of the Russian origin of Karelian cow names. It explores what the Russian-origin names mean, what the most common principles of naming are, and whether Russian names have Karelian equivalents. Attention is also paid to the spatial and temporal variation of the names. The data were collected in the 2010s by means of interviews. The data are compared with the name data recorded in the Dictionary of Karelian (KKS). The KKS data reveal extensive adaptation to the Karelian language, whereas in the interview data there is less adaptation to Karelian and the names are often thoroughly Russian. In the KKS data the most common principle of naming is the time of birth, and names based on colouration are also common. According to both data sets, the principles of naming have remained relatively consistent, and the data reveal no great spatial differences in the occurrence of names.

In this article we apply a folk linguistic listening task to examine how the Tver’ Karelians in Russia recognise a sample of their own dialect and a sample of Border Karelian (spoken in Finland), both recorded about 60 years ago. Tver’ Karelian and Border Karelian have a shared origin in Proto-Karelian but have been diverging from each other since the seventeenth century; the former has had strong influence from Russian and the latter from Finnish. The study investigates the Tver’ Karelians’ awareness of and observations about the Karelian language and shows that they easily recognise their own dialect, whereas the Border Karelian sample is harder to recognise and describe. However, the respondents observed and described lexical and phonetic features of this sample, and two thirds of them located the sample in the republic of Karelia or in Finland, mostly based on the ‘accent’ of the speaker.

Samuli Paulaharju was a Finnish ethnographer who visited the Kven minority in Northern Norway – Ruija – in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with his wife Jenny he collected ethnographic material among the Kvens, and corresponded frequently with some of them. Many wrote in Finnish, and most were self-taught writers.

We focus on the orthography used by these writers who were writing in a multilingual environment. We identify two writing cultures, one associated with Old Literary Finnish and Early Modern Finnish, the other with Modern Written Finnish (MWF). The orthography used by the former is characterized by the use of b, d, g for p, t, k in native Finnish words, which we attribute to influence from Norwegian. By contrast, the orthography of the latter largely resembles the MWF of the time. However, both groups substitute t for d – a phenomenon found in Finland during the same time period – as well as occasionally use Norwegian characters.