Tundra Yukaghir Grammar and Documentation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dejan Matic
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451559620

That project aimed at studying linguistic behaviour in a multilingual community in north-eastern Siberia and was planned as strongly field oriented. Unfortunately, important circumstances beyond our control (the Russian war in Ukraine) made further travelling to Russia impossible, so we now have to shift and somewhat expand the main focus of research. We plan to refocus the work from studying the patterns of multilingualism to documenting the current state of one of our target languages, Tundra Yukaghir (TY). The importance and urgency of this work is evident because of the moribund state of the language (35 fluent speakers, according to our recent estimate). The work will be possible because the TY materials we already collected during the course of the running project turned out to be significantly larger in quantity and considerably more complex than was initially anticipated. We can now estimate that we will have enough data for creating a comprehensive documentation of TY and do not intend to collect more during the new phase of research. The main goal of the project proposed in the current application is to make all materials already available to us publicly accessible. The first outcome will be a reference grammar of TY (to be published by Mouton Grammar Library). The language still lacks a comprehensive grammatical description reflecting the standards of modern scholarship, so it has played relatively little role in the considerations of modern linguists. There are numerous aspects of TY grammar which have not received adequate and systematic treatment previously or have not been addressed at all. The proposed volume will fill this gap. In addition, the book will introduce a large variety of data. Most of illustrative examples will come from the data collected during the course of the currently running project. They consist of spontaneous pieces of discourse, narrative texts and fragments obtained through elicitation. The second objective of the proposed research is to make all language materials available to us computer accessible in a searchable format. This will be done in two ways: in an open access online resource, free for public use (www.siberianlanguages.surrey.ac.uk), and in an open access digital archival repository (The Language Archive). Taken together, these project outcomes will be inherently valuable as timeless language documentation. They will provide a reference source for linguistics researchers, in particular scholars and students who work on Siberian linguistics, documentation and description of endangered languages, linguistic typology and theoretical linguistics. The non-academic audience will comprise members of the general public who are interested in finding out more about minority languages, TY community members devoted to the documentation and revitalization of their language, language learners and teachers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants