The Finno-Ugric Prosody Project

The aim of the Finno-Ugric Prosody Project is to analyze the prosodic structure of less-known Finno-Ugric languages, using acoustic phonetic techniques that have not been applied to the study of these languages before. The core group of researchers is affiliated with Tartu University in Estonia and directed by Professor Karl Pajusalu, but scholars associated with other institutions are also involved. We have been working more or less intensively for about seven years. Up to now we have completed our studies of the prosody of Erzya and Meadow Mari, and are in the process of analyzing Livonian. The selection of languages has been influenced by availability of speakers. The methodology involves recording of a corpus of systematically designed sentences by a set of speakers, and spectrographic analysis of these materials. The aim is to produce similar sets of data to facilitate comparison between languages.