Forest Enets (also called Bay, Pe-bay, or Karasino Yenissey Samoyed) is one of the two varieties of Enets, a Northern Samoyedic Uralic language, traditionally spoken in the northern part of central Siberia, in the Taymyr municipal region of Russia. Currently, approximately 30 speakers, all over 45, have fluent or near-fluent command of Forest Enets. They mostly live in the village of Potapovo and in the town of Dudinka on the Enissei river. The language is not used on an everyday basis, nor is it transmitted to children.

The text collection presented here contains, first, the modern texts recorded in 2005-2010 in Potapovo. Second, it includes the legacy texts recorded in 1960s – early 2000s., provided with transcription and analysis. We are much obliged to all researchers and institutions who shared the Enets part of their archives containing texts recorded from the previous generation of Enets speakers: Darya Bolina, Oksana Dobzhanskaya, Irina Sorokina, Anna Urmanchieva, the Dudinka branch of GTRK “Norilsk”, and the Taymyr House for Folk Culture.

The work on Forest Enets was supported by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (SOAS, London) within the project “Documentation of Enets: digitization and analysis of legacy field materials and fieldwork with last speakers” hosted by MPI-EVA. Project participants: Bernard Comrie, Olesya Khanina, and Andrey Shluinsky; trainee fieldworkers: Maria Ovsyannikova, Natalya Stoynova, and Sergey Trubetskoy; community collaborators: Zoya Bolina and Viktor Palchin.