Mark Tuovinen wrote:

>
>Good luck,  I can't even get a consensus from my Finnish speaking friends on the correct pronunciation of my last name, Tuovinen. It seems that everybody I have asked comes from a different region of the country and each has their own dialect.
>
>

Mark, that's funny!!

In my golden days of living in Bethel in western Alaska, I discovered
that the Eskimo people along the Kuskokwim and Yukon Rivers could not
understand each other. There were dialects unique to specific villages,
an a person from an upriver village couldn't understand a person from a
downriver village, except with some difficulty. Matters got even worse
when folks from the Kuskokwim tried talking to folks from the Yukon. It
was an interesting conunbrum to me in those old days. With the advent of
the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act  there was a huge
intermixing of native peoples in those regions, for the sake of working
out the details to get and comply with the act. The result was somewhat
of an amalgamation of the many Kuskokwim and Yukon Yu'pik dialects.
Common to them all though was English, which had been brought many years
before by the missonaries. Having english as a common language to all
really helped in working out the details of the ALCS down to the last
individual. The isolation did strange things to language in the old
days, but modernization changed things radically. Now all those little
villages scattered over the tundra in that part of the world are hooked
to the whole world via satelite and the internet, and it has wrought
huge changes, some good, some not so good,

Best Regards,

John Rodgers
88 GL Driver
Chelsea, AL