Objectives of the Project

One of the Institute’s most frequently used archives, the Names Archive contains valuable information for onomasts and linguists, as well as for archaeologists, historians, folklorists and natural scientists. Genealogists can also find interesting supplementary material in the archive. For the public administration, the Names Archive is an important source of information for name planning.

The archive contains approx. 2.7 million entry slips with details like the name entry in standard Finnish, the dialectal form and inflection of the name, location (parish, village, house and coordinates), classification of the location, description of the location (if applicable) and any information about the name or location acquired by interviewing people. In addition to verbal descriptions of the locations, the names have been indicated on collection maps (approximately 10,000).