Project description

The project “Development of the web-site ‘Minority languages of Siberia as our cultural heritage’ (on the material of the languages of the basin Middle Yenisei and the Middle and the Upper Taz)” was realized at the Laboratory for Computational Lexicography, Research Computing Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University, with financial support from Russian Foundation for the Humanities, grant 12-04-12049. 

The objective of the project was the development of a multi-media website containing comprehensive data on autochthonous minority languages of the basins of the Middle-Yenisei and the Middle- and Upper-Taz – Selkup, Ket and Evenki. On the site the following types of data are supposed to be found: 

  • sociolinguistic data characterizing the functioning and degree of preservation of Selkup, Ket, or Evenki in the surveyed villages; 
  • sounding thematic dictionaries of Selkup, Ket and Evenki local dialects recorded in the field within the last decade and a half and loaded into a database, which is to be developed for that purpose; 
  • annotated Selkup, Ket and Evenki text corpora containing texts of various genres in local dialects of these languages both recorded in the course of our expeditions of the last 2 decades and extracted from archives (first of all, from the archive of Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Siences, Saint Petersburg; each recently recorded text will be represented with an audio file, with a graphic version in the officially adopted for each language graphic system, with a phonetic transcription approaching a phonemic one, but reflecting specific features of each local dialect, and with a phrase-for-phrase Russian translation; some texts will be also represented with video files; archival texts will be represented only with graphic files in the graphics used by the researcher, who had recorded it, in the modern officially adopted graphic system and in phonetic transcription; the annotation will consist of characteristics attributed to each text as a whole and characteristics assigned to different units inside the texts; some texts will be supplied with morphological indexing, they will be represented in the ELAN format; 
  • Selkup, Ket and Evenki language learning games; 
  • documentaries showing the functioning of the languages and the life of their speakers; 
  • photos representing the life of the villages, people and environment.

The primarily informational source for the site was the Multimedia Computer Archive of materials in local dialects of Selkup, Ket and Evenki, recorded in the course of linguistic expeditions regularly organized and led within the laboratory, but we are going to draw relevant information from published works and archives as well.
Working at the site, we kept two target groups in focus: on the one hand, we address the academic community – linguists, anthropologists, historians, on the other hand, we address the speakers of the languages presented on the site, those who teach or learn these languages. Basically anyone who wants to get acquainted with languages and cultures of Siberian peoples, an integral part of our cultural heritage.

Project leader

Olga Kazakevich (Research Computing Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University)

Project participants

Daria Vakhoneva (Research Computing Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University)
Elena Kliachko (National Research University Higher School of Economy)
Konstantin Polivanov (Historical and civil-rights society “Memorial”)

Elena Mikhailovna Budyanskaya (Research Computing Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University)
Marina Vorontsova (Research Computing Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University)
Julia Galiamina (Research Computing Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University)
Larisa Pavlinskaya (Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences)
Eugenia Renkovskaya (LLC “ABI InfoPoisk”)
Tatiana Reutt (Research Computing Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University)
Irina Rostunova (LLC “Oriol-Basis”)
Alexander Chvyrev (Research Computing Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University)