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21/04/2020. The Day of Karelian and Vepsian Written Language
April 20, 2020:
That day in 1989, the alphabets and spelling rules of the Karelian and Vepsian language were approved.
The collection of the National Library of Karelia contains unique pre-revolutionary editions in Karelian and Vepsian. One of the first printed editions in Karelian language is The Gospel of Matthew (St-Petersburg, 1820). This book was given by the State Library of Württemberg (Stuttgart, Germany).
The Russian-Karelian Dictionary was compiled by Mikhail Georgievsky, the teacher of Svyatozero one-year school, and published in Saint-Petersburg in 1908.
The first textbook in Vepsian (Tshud language) based on the Russian alphabet was Russian-Tshud Dictionary prepared by the teacher of Olonets county Pavel Uspensky (1882-1941) and published in Saint-Petersburg in 1913.
The National Library of Karelia has also gathered a rare collection of fiction books and textbooks, published in 1930-s in publishing houses of Petrozavodsk, Moscow and Leningrad in Karelian and Vepsian language using Cyrillic alphabet.
You can get acquainted with electronic versions of these books, that are bibliographic rarities, on the site The Finno-Ugric Libraries of Russia at the sections The Electronic Collection of Books in Karelian Language, The Electronic Collection of Books in Vepsian Language, and in the electronic catalogue of the National Library of the Republic of Karelia.
A collection of textbooks with an opening address by Olga Ilyukha, the Doctor of Historical Sciences, the Head of the Institute of Language, Literature and History of the Karelian Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is presented at the section The Electronic Collection of Textbooks in Different Languages of the Peoples of Karelia on the site The Finno-Ugric Libraries of Russia.