Under the direction of Dr. Masayoshi Shibatani, Mr. Andrei Filtchenko will conduct fieldwork in northwestern Siberia on Eastern Khanty, an endangered Ugric language which is spoken natively by fewer than 300 people. The project will produce a detailed morpho-syntactic description of Eastern Khanty, whose dialects exhibit typologically rare and archaic features at various levels of language organization. Selected methodology will include contrastive morpho-syntactic and contextual analysis based on the narrative corpus, attending to the information structure, within the cognitive-functional framework. Special attention will be assigned to the issues of voice, transitivity and case in their functional-pragmatic motivation and as instrumental in text cohesion. Mr. Filtchenko will produce in trilingual multimedia format a reference grammar, text corpora and a Khanty-Russian-English dictionary, which will serve as valuable tools for both educational and academic purposes.
Why is it important to document unwritten languages such as the language of the north-western Siberian aboriginal nation of Eastern Khanty? Language is a complex accumulation of information about a human community's evolution, a joint social, cognitive, psychological experience, often a single artefact of social history, migration, social organization, cross-community interaction. Mr. Filtchenko will archive and disseminate the linguistic data in standardised formats accessible and useful both to the academic community and to native Eastern Khanty communities. The language data will be accompanied in accessible cross-reference form with cultural context information, ethnographic comments, audio, photo and video documents, to help better understand how the language is used by the native speakers in everyday life, and ultimately, the place, function, origin and evolution of language as an indivisible feature of human society. The language and culture data will form the core database for the reference and pedagogical materials, and offer a significant contribution to the native language preservation efforts of local communities and minority education initiatives.
