In Yakutia, over 50% of the population is Russian. Most of these people only came to Yakutia during the 20th century. However, there are also some extremely old Russian settlements where interesting linguistic traditions have been preserved through their isolation from the outside world and their non-Russian (i.e. Yakutian, Evenk, Yukagirian) linguistic surroundings. These preserved linguistic traditions are of great importance for research in the history of language and culture.

Russkoye Ustye first caught my attention when I read Reinhold Trautmann's monograph on the Russian heroic epos of the Byline. Here, Trautmann writes about the spread of this folkloristic tradition: "The area of Yakutia is more richly represented. First and foremost, Chudyakov recorded a good song of Alyosha and Tugarin during the 70s of the previous century, which came from the village of Russkoye Ustye (near the mouth of Indigirka, approximately at 71 degrees northern latitude). This is absolutely the northern-most point where the Byline has been found" (Trautmann 1935, 11).

The idea of making language recordings with a dialectological intent in this village comes from Leonid L. Kasatkin of the Institute for Russian Language at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He advised me to travel there and to collect spoken material; excepting a small number of fairy tale texts, which Asbelev and his group collected in 1976, there are no traces of this extraordinary area to be heard. I was accompanied on the expedition by Sasha Krasovitsky, a collegue of Kasatkin's from the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

The financial basis for this venture was secured by a project which the Deutsche Forschunggemeinschaft had granted me. We left for Russkoye Ustye in early June of 1996. Our expedition resulted in appr. 24 hours of digital recordings which are currently being integrated into an acoustic database of Russian dialects. In Yakutsk, Sasha Krasovitsky and I both found the kind support of Prof. Nikolai Samsonov, of the administrative chairman in Tshokurdakh and of the major Aleksey and the entire population in Russkoye Ustye. I would like to express my gratitude to all of these people at this point.

Christian Sappok