The focus of the project is
the situation of the long-term language contact in Russian outpost communities
in the tundra area of Siberia and in the Kamchatka Peninsular. The communities
in question emerged as result of Russian colonization of northern territories in
the 17th century (in Siberia) and in the 18th (in
Kamchatka). Large-scale migration from European Russia that in the course of
time completely modified the ethnographic and linguistic situation in Siberia
and Far East during a long time did not affect small Russian outpost communities
in remote and hard-to-reach areas. Old settlers there preserved the lifestyle
and the language of their ancestors, namely of the mixed Slavic–indigenous
population which inhabited Russian townships and strongholds in the early years
of colonization. Each of these communities developed its own variant of the
language influenced by environment and social situation.
The problem of contact areas
with Slavonic element in Siberia at first caught up my mind in 1997 in the
course of the expedition to Russkoye Ustye in lower Indigirka. At that time my
professional activities were concentrated around archaic Russian dialects and
Professor Christian Sappok invited me to join him in the expedition with the
intent to record and to investigate a variety of language which should have
preserved extremely old features through its isolation from traditional Russian
speaking territory for about four centuries. Our work there as well as our
posterior expeditions to other Russian townships in Yakutia and Kamchatka
ensured me that interethnic contacts to a great extent determined the linguistic
history and current state of the communities in question.
The preliminary research of
the four varieties with the focus on segmental phonetics and prosody was carried
out within the frames of the project “The language of the old settlers of
Siberia” at Department of Phonetics of the Russian Language
Institute (Russian Academy of Sciences) in collaboration with Seminar
fuer Slavistik (Ruhr University, Bochum, Professor Christian Sappok).
In 2003 the project “Russian in Siberia.
Acoustic Database and Contact Phenomena” was granted by the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation and currently is being implemented at the Seminar fuer
Slavistik of the Ruhr University.
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