The divisive frontier: the impact of the Russian-Finnish border on Karelian

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed numerous overt language conflicts in eastern Central Europe, where ethnic borders often do not converge with political ones. In this paper thefocus is on the northeastern region, where diverging ethnic and political borders have over the centuries shown multifarious effects on languages spoken in the border area as well. The perspective is diachronic: the paper is concerned with the development of the border between Finland and Russia from the fourteenth Century onward, and it sketches an overview of what is currently known about the impact of the changing political geographies on one ofthe languages spoken in the border area, namely Karelian. The changes in the political border are shown in a series ofmaps. The discussion is to some extent biased toward the external history, due to the fact that with the exception of sound history, very little is known about the internal history of the Karelian language. However, the paper gives brief accounts of a number of linguistic features that have so far been attributed to the diverging and the converging effects of the political history in the Finnish-Russian border area. The paper also seeks to provide an introductory description concerning the current state ofhistorical and dialectological research on Karelian and the development of the eastern Finnic dialect continuum uniting the dialects of Finnish spoken in eastern Finland with Karelian and Vepsian, spoken in the Republic of Karelia in northwest Russia.