Audio Recordings Archive

Services

The Audio Recordings Archive (Suomen kielen nauhoitearkisto) is open to all scholars, students and members of the public. You are welcome to listen to our recordings in the archives, or order yourself a CD copy. We also lend recording equipment to scholars and students. The public online edition of our audio collection database: http://kaino.kotus.fi/naark (in Finnish).

The Collections

The Audio Recordings Archive holds over 23,000 hours of recordings collected since 1959, providing authentic samples of Finnish dialects, languages related to Finnish, and other world languages. The collection additionally includes samples of Finnish dialects spoken in Sweden, Norway, Ingria, the United States and Australia.

Digitisation of the audio bank was undertaken in 1999. Over half of its content has been digitised, totalling almost 15,000 hours of recordings (31.12.2012).

Content

The dialect archive has been assembled over a period of decades, featuring dialect-speakers conversing freely about topics ranging from birth and death to holidays and everyday chores. The recordings yield valuable insights not only to linguists and other scholars, but to anyone with an interest in Finnish history.

Most of the speakers were born between 1880 and 1920, and were aged 70–80 at the time the recordings were made. All recordings were made in the interviewees’ homes.

We are currently in the process of compiling new audio material on contemporary spoken Finnish and cultural history, including recordings of dissertations and presentations on linguistics.

Additional resources

Key word lists are available for the cultural history collection and for part of the dialect archive. Type-written contents lists are available for the oldest dialect recordings in the collection. These are currently being scanned to facilitate the upkeep of the collection.

Transcripts exist for roughly 1,000 hours of our recordings. These are available for perusal on the premises. Part of the transcript collection will be available in digital format in the near future.

The recordings in the archive form the basis of a fifty-part series of publications entitled Suomen kielen näytteitä (‘Samples of spoken Finnish’). Many other dialect-related publications are also based on material in the audio archive.

Our former collection of 7,000 photographs of interviewees in their original settings has been entrusted to the National Board of Antiquities’ Picture Archives.