The Electronic Morphology Archives for Finnish Dialects project received funding from the Production, Management and Use of Digital Information Resources programme of the Academy of Finland . The aim of the project (1.11.2001 – 31.10.2004) was to create a morphologically systematized database of Finnish dialects on the Internet for the purposes of linguistic research.
The project has accomplished the creation of a digital database of Finnish dialects (Digital Morphology Archives = DMA). Since May 2002, web service has been available. In October 2003, the service was transferred to the CSC Linguistic Databank.
The database include 138,000 morphologically encoded examples of clauses in context (around one million words) from 145 parish dialects (i.e. approx. one-third of the parishes in Finland ). So far, a total of 497,000 morphological codes have been added to the phrasal samples (approx. 4 codes for each example). The parish collections which have been coded thoroughly each example have been assigned 5–10 codes.
An Internet search facility developed jointly with the Linguistic Databank allows quick and straightforward searches both of the entire material and of individual parishes or dialect areas. Searches can also be made directly from texts in dialect. These word and phrase searches can also be targeted at dialect texts without diacritic marks. Searches can also be refined by limiting them to certain linguistic categories according to a morphological classification containing 897 codes.
The ready-coded material is easy to use and it is accessible world wide. The Internet-based electronic archives promotes learning and research in all Finnish language teaching sites in Finland as well as abroad. It is also useful for general linguistic research and for developing digital archiving.