Multimedia documentation

of the endangered Vasyugan and Alexandrovo Khanty dialects

of Tomsk region in Siberia

(ELDP FTG 0135)

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Locations of the fieldwork, origin of the data

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LANGUAGE DATA

MULTIMEDIA DATA

SOCIOLINGUISTIC DATA

The present-day territory settled by the Khanty lies immediately north-east of Ural range, generally following the Ob river south-east until the Vasyugan tributary. General density of population in the Khanty spoken area is approximately 1 pers. per 10 km. Traditional settlement patterns imply extended family/clan villages (5-10 pers.) located along the river and lake banks, with distances between the villages ranging between 5 and 50 km.

By the time of early Russian contacts in late XIII century language communities generally resided in their current locations, the Khanty together with the Mansi may have numbered approximately 13,000. It is possible that certain elements of the ethnographic and linguistic characteristics of the present-day Khanty, which now have typical taiga appearance, retain many elements of southern proto-cultures of nomadic steppe horse-breeders.

Based on available information dating back to early XIV century the population numbers changed unevenly, thus Khanty, Evenk, Nenets, Tatar populations were approximately comparable to current populations, whereas such groups as Ket, Selkup, Mansi, Chulym, Enets, Dolgan decreased considerably. Naturally current population numbers do not reflect the numbers of the respective languages speakers. The majority of indigenous ethnic communities are linguistically assimilated Russian monolinguals, with the remaining minority native language speakers being to varying extent bilingual. Early Russian colonial policies were conservationist with minimal Russian language contact and assimilative pressures, with the exposure to Russian growing considerably in the end of the XIX century and increasing radically in 1930-1960’s as a result of the soviet collectivization and forced migration (exile) policies. In 1960s-1980’s, most of the area was under heavy assimilative pressure entailed by policies of social engineering, mandatory secondary schooling (Russian media boarding schools) and particularly by the mineral resource exploration programs resulting in considerable influx of non-native population from European Russia, Ukraine and middle-Asian regions.

Prior to the Russian contact, native Ugric (Khanty) groups in the area had been in contact with Turkic languages (Chulym, Tatar), particularly in the south/south-west, as the area was under administrative control of Siberian Tatar Khan; with Samoyedic languages (Selkup, Nenets, Enets, Nganasan) and Altaic languages (Evenk, Dolgan) in the north/north-east; and Yeniseic languages (Ket, Yugh, Kott) in the east. Based on available folk data, language/culture contact with Tatars, Nenets and among other local ethnic groups was fairly limited, with inter-ethnic relations generally hostile.

The language of the Khanty (a.k.a. Ostyak) forms, together with Mansi, the Ob'-Ugric subgroup of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family. Though often considered to be a single language, Khanty is actually a group of dialect clusters (western and eastern).

In the northern tundra ecosystem, Khanty are traditional rein-deer herders and fishers, while in the southern taiga swamp ecosystem they are forest hunter-fisher-gatherers. The occupational divide (tundra rein-deer breeders vs. taiga hunter-fishers) roughly coincides with big dialectal clustering: western (north-west tundra) vs. eastern (south-east forests). Based on settlement and occupation patterns, language varieties are traditionally described as river dialects, with major Ob-river tributaries marking major river dialects: Vasyugan, Vakh, Agan, Tromagan, Yugan, Sosva, Kazym, etc.

The dialects of interest in this study are closely related river dialects of Vasyugan Khanty and Alexandrovo Khanty. These dialects are particularly interesting as they represent a reportedly more archaic and richer system, in morphosyntactic terms.

The Eastern Khanty population is distributed in strings of villages along the Vasyugan river tributary and the middle flows of Ob river in the Kargasok and Alexandrovo districts of Tomsk region respectively. They constitute about 3% of the total Khanty population. Historically and presently in the Tomsk Region they have always been a minority and have lived remotely from other Khanty groups, such as those of the Tyumen region, where there are still majority-Khanty settlements to be found.

The language data originates from the collaboration with the speakers of these dialects in Kargasok District (villages Novyj Vasyugan, Myldgino, NovoYugino) and Aleksandrovskij District (villages Aleksandrovskoe, Svetlaja Protoka, Lukashkin Yar, Novonikolskoe, Nazino) of Tomsk region.

Komsomolsky pr. 75, k.246, Tomsk 634041 Russia.