Best practices for spatial language data harmonization, sharing and map creation-A case study of Uralic.

Despite remarkable progress in digital linguistics, extensive databases of geographical language distributions are missing. This hampers both studies on language spatiality and public outreach of language diversity. We present best practices for creating and sharing digital spatial language data by collecting and harmonizing Uralic language distributions as case study. Language distribution studies have utilized various methodologies, and the results are often available as printed maps or written descriptions. In order to analyze language spatiality, the information must be digitized into geospatial data, which contains location, time and other parameters. When compiled and harmonized, this data can be used to study changes in languages' distribution, and combined with, for example, population and environmental data. We also utilized the knowledge of language experts to adjust previous and new information of language distributions into state-of-the-art maps. The extensive database, including the distribution datasets and detailed map visualizations of the Uralic languages are introduced alongside this article, and they are freely available.

Genes reveal traces of common recent demographic history for most of the Uralic-speaking populations.

BACKGROUND: The genetic origins of Uralic speakers from across a vast territory in the temperate zone of North Eurasia have remained elusive. Previous studies have shown contrasting proportions of Eastern and Western Eurasian ancestry in their mitochondrial and Y chromosomal gene pools. While the maternal lineages reflect by and large the geographic background of a given Uralic-speaking population, the frequency of Y chromosomes of Eastern Eurasian origin is distinctively high among European Uralic speakers. The autosomal variation of Uralic speakers, however, has not yet been studied comprehensively. RESULTS: Here, we present a genome-wide analysis of 15 Uralic-speaking populations which cover all main groups of the linguistic family. We show that contemporary Uralic speakers are genetically very similar to their local geographical neighbours. However, when studying relationships among geographically distant populations, we find that most of the Uralic speakers and some of their neighbours share a genetic component of possibly Siberian origin. Additionally, we show that most Uralic speakers share significantly more genomic segments identity-by-descent with each other than with geographically equidistant speakers of other languages. We find that correlated genome-wide genetic and lexical distances among Uralic speakers suggest co-dispersion of genes and languages. Yet, we do not find long-range genetic ties between Estonians and Hungarians with their linguistic sisters that would distinguish them from their non-Uralic-speaking neighbours. CONCLUSIONS: We show that most Uralic speakers share a distinct ancestry component of likely Siberian origin, which suggests that the spread of Uralic languages involved at least some demic component.