Endangered Languages And The Use Of Sound Archives And Fieldwork Data For Their Documentation And Revitalisation: Voices From Tundra And Taiga

• Main Author: de Graaf, Tjeerd
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM Press) 2011
• Subjects: P1-1091 Philology. Linguistics(General)
• Online Access: http://eprints.usm.my/40486/1/deGraaf-EndangeredLanguages.pdf; http://eprints.usm.my/40486/; http://ijaps.usm.my/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/deGraaf-EndangeredLanguages.pdf

The research program Voices from Tundra and Taiga has been devoted to the study of endangered languages and cultures of the Russian Federation, which must be described rapidly before they become extinct. This research is in the fortunate position that earlier work on the reconstruction technology for old sound recordings found in archives in St. Petersburg has made it possible to compare languages still spoken in the proposed research area to the same languages as they were spoken more than half a century ago. We have prepared a catalogue of the existing recordings, and a phono and video library of recorded stories, and of the folklore, singing and oral traditions of some minority peoples in the Russian Federation and its bordering areas. For this purpose, the existing sound recordings in the archives have been used together with the results obtained from new fieldwork expeditions. At present, many old recordings still remain hidden in private archives and places where the quality of preservation is not guaranteed. In a research project on Endangered Archives, we make part of these recordings available and add them to the database developed in St. Petersburg.