International Winter Schools for Finno-Ugric Studies

The Finno-Ugric / Uralic languages, spoken in Central Europe (Hungarian), Fennoscandia and the Circum-Baltic area (Finnish, Estonian and other Finnic languages, the Sámi languages), in European Russia and Western Siberia, are investigated and taught at numerous universities and research institutions around the world. Typically, the institutes of Finno-Ugric studies are small, their resources and expertise cannot cover the whole language family, let alone the diverse aspects of Finno-Ugric studies, from the traditional historical-comparative linguistic and ethnographic approaches to numerous other fields of research: applied linguistics (language teaching, language planning), sociolinguistics, language typology, etc.

In the academic year 2012-2013, six university institutes for Finno-Ugric/Uralic studies in Vienna, Szeged, Munich, Hamburg, Tartu and Helsinki joined their forces to organise the First International Winter School in Finno-Ugric Studies. This initiative was financed  by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission. The First Winter school took place in Vienna in February 2013, the second one in Szeged in January 2014.

The Erasmus funding scheme has changed, but the cooperation continues. The third Winter School was organised in Munich in February 2015, now with one additional partner: the University of Turku.

Beginning with the winter term 2015-2016, the new Erasmus+ cooperation plan was finally funded. The new cooperation InFUSE (Integrating Finno-Ugric Studies in Europe), now also including the University of Uppsala, Sweden, will include further winter schools, the first of these in Tartu in February 2016, but also other activities.

For further information about the cooperation, please visit the InFUSE homepage.