Ėven
The project aims at documenting three highly endangered variants of Ėven that currently still have enough fluent speakers to make a comprehensive documentation feasible. These are the dialect spoken in the village of Sebjan-Küöl in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), which is the westernmost Ėven dialect still spoken; the dialect spoken in the village of Topolinoe in Yakutia, which also belongs to the Western dialect group, but is in an intermediate geographic location and the dialect spoken in the Bystraja district on Kamchatka representing the Eastern dialect group. It will be attempted to record speech from as many fluent individuals as are willing to contribute their knowledge to the project, and to cover as wide a range of genres as possible, including folklore, procedural texts, oral life histories, and spontaneous conversations.
Given the importance of reindeer herding for Ėven culture and self-identification, a thematic focus will be the collection of ethnographic and linguistic data pertaining to the domain of reindeer husbandry. To this aim, reindeer terminology will be collected and illustrated photographically, and procedural texts describing various aspects of reindeer husbandry (such as the preparation of leather and the sewing of herders’ garments, the construction of the traditional nomadic yurt, the saddling and harnessing of reindeer) will be elicited. This linguistic focus on reindeer will be mirrored by the ethnographic documentation of the role of reindeer husbandry in the modern Ėven ways of life. A strong focus of the project will be on the collection of comparable data, in order to enable the documentation of cultural and linguistic differences as well as similarities. For this purpose, the elicitation of texts and information dealing with identical topics in all three field sites will be emphasized.
Given the importance of reindeer herding for Ėven culture and self-identification, a thematic focus will be the collection of ethnographic and linguistic data pertaining to the domain of reindeer husbandry. To this aim, reindeer terminology will be collected and illustrated photographically, and procedural texts describing various aspects of reindeer husbandry (such as the preparation of leather and the sewing of herders’ garments, the construction of the traditional nomadic yurt, the saddling and harnessing of reindeer) will be elicited. This linguistic focus on reindeer will be mirrored by the ethnographic documentation of the role of reindeer husbandry in the modern Ėven ways of life. A strong focus of the project will be on the collection of comparable data, in order to enable the documentation of cultural and linguistic differences as well as similarities. For this purpose, the elicitation of texts and information dealing with identical topics in all three field sites will be emphasized.