The present documentation is a multimedia collection of linguistic and cultural information, which consists of a corpus of original texts in several minority languages in audio and (partly) video format with transcriptions, translations, and analyses, as well as general information about the language, references, dictionaries, and images, all linked to present a flexible and interactive exploration space for a variety of users, and to document a wide range of phenomena. The aim is to provide people from various backgrounds (linguists, anthropologists, speakers, language planners and the general public) with a database that can serve a variety of purposes.

Siberian Languages

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Even: 63.550000, 135.920000
Forest Enets: 69.582500, 83.344300
Kolyma Yukaghir: 66.861100, 154.688000
Khanty: 66.302200, 68.554700
Tundra Nenets: 67.977200, 52.936800
Tundra Yukaghir: 69.100000, 154.260000
Udihe: 47.000000, 134.000000
Test language: 63.430000, -170.270000

Endangered Languages and Cultures of Siberia began as a collaborative effort between Prof. Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS University of London) and Dr. Edward Garrett (SOAS University of London and Pinedrop) in 2011. Irina Nikolaeva is responsible for the conception of the project, its coordination, and the recording and analysis of textual materials of Tundra Nenets, Northern Khanty, Kolyma Yukaghir and (partly) Udihe. Edward Garrett developed the software for transcription display and glossaries, and designed the web-interface. From 2016, the project was further developed in collaboration with Dr. Oliver Bond (University of Surrey) who provided support with infrastructure, coding and design.

The Endangered Languages and Cultures of Siberia site should be cited as follows:

Nikolaeva, Irina, Edward Garrett and Oliver Bond. 2019. Endangered Languages and Cultures of Siberia. www.siberianlanguages.surrey.ac.uk.

We thank the following linguists who generously shared their language materials with us:

  • Olesya Khanina (olesya.khanina@gmail.com): Forest Enets
  • Cecilia Odé: Tundra Yukaghir
  • Dejan Matić (matic@uni-muenster.de): Even and Tundra Yukaghir
  • Maria Tolskaya (mtolskaya@hotmail.com): Udihe
  • Andrey Shluinskiy (ashl@yandex.ru): Forest Enets

Several people contributed in one way or another to the recording, analysis, translation and transcription of the texts published here, as well as with developing the web platform.

  • Aicha Belkadi
  • Alexandr Ivanov
  • Nick Jenkins
  • Larisa Leisiö
  • Elena Perekhvalskaya
  • Joe Perry
  • Timothy Riese
  • Sandy Ritchie
  • Tapani Salminen
  • Éva Schmidt

Their help is gratefully acknowledged.

Various stages of this work have been funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant (2011-2012, project number 9480 BX51), a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2012-2014, project number RF-2012-131), a SOAS Faculty of Languages and Cultures Strategy Fund award (2014), a grant from the Academy of Finland awarded to Larisa Leisiö (2009-2012, project number 125225), an AHRC-funded project ‘Prominent Possessors’ awarded to Irina Nikolaeva (PI) (2015-2018, project reference AH/M010708/1), and a DFG-funded project ‘Small-scale multilingualism and language mixing in the Lower Kolyma Tundra’ awarded to Dejan Matić (No MA 6339/5-1).

We gratefully acknowledge the Surrey Morphology Group and the University of Surrey for providing the infrastructure to house this resource.

Contact details:

  • For comments on the language materials and linguistic content of the site, please contact Irina Nikolaeva (in3@soas.ac.uk).
  • For technical issues, please contact Oliver Bond (o.bond@surrey.ac.uk).
  • For more information on Pinedrop, please contact Edward Garrett (edward@pinedrop.com).