Clustering lexical variation of Finnic languages based on Atlas Linguarum Fennicarum.

The article focuses on lexical relations of the Finnic languages. Here we studied whether lexical data is suitable for detecting the coarse-grained and fine-grained substructure within the Finnic group. We evaluated this by clustering old lexical variation from a dialectal dataset covering the whole Finnic speaker area (Atlas Linguarum Fennicarum; ALFE) using quantitative methods adopted from population genetics, and by comparing our results to groups suggested by earlier linguistic literature. We found the main lexical division between north-eastern and south-western Finnic. According to our lexical analysis, the Finnic languages are Finnish, North Estonian, South Estonian, Livonian, Karelian, Veps, and Votic-Ingrian. These groups matched well with the earlier suggested divisions, and we concluded that lexical data could be utilised more often in defining linguistic sub-structures, especially in linguistic situations that involve dialect continua.Peer reviewe