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Evenki people dancing in the of Bakal- dyn near Yakutsk.

Voices from Tundra and Taiga Vitality and Education In the Evenki village of Bakaldyn, some 60 kilometres from Yakutsk, a dancing and healing ritual is taking Report > place. Holding twigs with dry leaves glowing at the edges, diseases and evil thoughts are exorcized and, thus North East Asia healed, the village can be entered. As the Evenki perform songs and dances surrounded by reindeer, the sun author the of courtesy photos All slowly sets behind the trees and the temperature drops below minus thirty degrees Celsius. If we do not hasten to record a cultural and linguistic description of such rituals, this unique expression of the Evenki identity and Linguist and folklorist Anna Myreeva (right) experience of the world will be lost for humanity. Visiting this ritual was the beginning of a hopefully fruitful during an Evenki healing ritual in Bakaldyn cooperation with the fascinating peoples of the Asian North. near Yakutsk.

By Cecilia Odé CD/DVD and on the internet (for exam- eration. As for the languages spoken on ple, spoken texts, songs, folkloristic nar- the island, Nivkh and Ulta are probably ative speakers of different ethnic ratives) to be used for research, and also the oldest and only aboriginal ones. Ngroups in the region are bilin- to develop courseware for the safe- Nivkh is an isolated language, while the gual: they all speak Russian. It is main- guarding and revitalizing of the given other indigenous languages of the area, ly elderly women who use or under- languages. including Ulta, belong to the Tungusic stand their indigenous language, languages (explanation follows below). sometimes rather poorly, by their own Sakhalin Ulta, being in a much worse situation admission. From Stalin to Gorbachov, The island of Sakhalin, with a length than Nivkh, is in dire need of linguistic roughly speaking, languages other than of nearly 950 kilometres and a varying research and training programmes. Russian were, if not forbidden, at least width from 15 to 40 kilometres, is home Until 1995, Ulta was an unwritten lan- not taught on the island of Sakhalin. to a persistently decreasing population guage, and the only materials available Children were taken to boarding of approximately 600,000 today, some consist of a limited language descrip- schools where Russian was the one and 170,000 of whom live in the capital tion and some booklets with fairy tales, only language. This explains why most Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Of the island’s games, and songs using the Cyrillic competent speakers of indigenous lan- total population 83 per cent is Russian. alphabet. At present, an Ulta alphabet guages are of the older generation. It is, The indigenous population of Sakhalin is under construction and other steps

therefore, remarkable that one of their Microsoft of Courtesy as well as some of its languages are toward its preservation are also taken. teachers, Nivkh language teacher Mrs The island of Sakhalin and the Republic (Yakutia) in the north-eastern part of , closely related to the indigenous people In Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (Sakhalin), at S.F. Bessonova, was recently awarded Russian Federation. and languages on the Japanese side of the Sakhalin Regional Museum, the the title ‘Teacher of Merit of the Russ- the border. After a period of Japanese week-long seminar ‘New approaches ian Federation’, showing that, in con- again be taught. Within this new envi- and Taiga’, which aims to build a sci- rule from 1905 till 1945, Sakhalin, for safeguarding the disappearing lan- temporary , indigenous lan- ronment, there still is urgent need for entific digital phono- and video-library together with the neighbouring Kuril guages and cultures of the aboriginal guages have been rehabilitated and may a project such as ‘Voices from Tundra of ethnolinguistic materials on Islands, is now part of the Russian Fed- peoples of Sakhalin’ included a training in the teaching of phonetics for native teachers of the four endangered lan- guages of Sakhalin: Nivkh, Ulta, Even- ki, and Nanai. The group of participants of the seminars organized on the island Language Vitality and Endangerment was very heterogeneous with only some of them having had a linguistic educa- In the tables below the total population of ethnic groups included in the programme ‘Voices from Tundra and Taiga’ on Sakhalin and in the Sakha tion. All were highly motivated and had Republic are given, including numbers of members still speaking their mother tongue. The degree of endangerment, according to the UNESCO Red- come to the capital wishing to improve book of Endangered Languages, does not only depend on the number of actual speakers, although it is an important feature. For a detailed discussion their skills as a language teacher and, see Language Vitality and Endangerment by the UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages: Paris, March 2003. Note that most data pre- some of them, keen to research their sented here are from various sources, some of which go back to 1989 and 1993. Numbers have been rounded off. own cultural heritage. Our main sub- jects were orthography, orthoepy, and Sakhalin prosody (stress, intonation, duration, Ethnic group Total population Population on Sakhalin Speakers Speakers on Sakhalin Degree of endangerment and rhythm), for which there is so far Nivkh 4,500 2,500 1,000 500 seriously endangered hardly any courseware available. Dur- Ulta 350 350 <35 <35 nearly extinct ing lessons confusion arose, due to the Evenki 30,000 190 10,000 30 endangered fact that Nikvh has three dialects. The Nanai 12,000 170 5,800 40 seriously endangered students addressed matters such as, ‘Which dialect do we teach our chil- Sakha Republic dren?’ These serious discussions were Ethnic group Total population Population in Sakha Speakers Speakers in Sakha Degree of endangerment interrupted by pleasant breaks in which Yukagir (tundra) 700 700 <50 <50 nearly extinct women came up with the origin of Yukagir (forest) 400 400 <50 <50 nearly extinct names: such as iuiuk ‘eternal spleen’ for Evenki 30,000 14,500 10,000 1,200 endangered females, and, to exorcize a new-born Even 17,000 8,500 7,000 2,800 endangered boy, ochan ‘sick and evil’. This seminar was an important step

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towards the realization of one of the Master’s degree. In fact, this is exactly Information > aims of the project: the creation of a what we are aiming at: local linguists research centre in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. describing a local language, enhancing Projects related to ‘Voices from Tundra and Taiga’ In this centre, teachers and scholars on its vitality and passing it on to future www.let.rug.nl/~degraaf the island will be involved in education generations. < www.let.rug.nl/~markus and in describing the languages of local www.elpr.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp

< ethnic groups. Dr Cecilia Odé is a research fellow at the www.nwo.nl; www.mpi.nl/DOBES At Sakhalin State University, work- IIAS, Leiden University, and at the Institute www.fa.knaw.nl shops were organized with the aim of of Phonetic Sciences, University of Amster- attracting young linguists to study local dam. Her specialization includes Russian, UNESCO Redbook on endangered languages in Northeast Asia languages. And, during a long inter- Indonesian, and Papuan phonetics and eth- www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/nasia_report.html view about the seminar on Sakhalin TV, nolinguistics. The Sakhalin Regional Museum young viewers were invited to express [email protected] www.museum.sakh.com their opinion on the need to safeguard [email protected] The Institute of Northern Minority Problems in Yakutsk the culture of northern peoples: for sci- www.iias.nl/iias/research/ode/index.html www.sakha.ru/sakha/ync/ync_eng/narod.htm entific purposes (13 votes), for the peo- The Sakhalin Energy Investment Company

Tundra and Taiga’ is partly financed by the Netherlands the by financed partly is Taiga’ and Tundra by and (NWO) Research Scientific for Organization Ltd. Company Investment Energy Sakhalin The seminar on Sakhalin was fully financed Sakhalin by Energy Investment Company Ltd., and Yuzh- in Museum Regional Sakhalin the at organized coopera- in Roon Tatyana Director by no-Sakhalinsk tion with Tjeerd de Graaf (Frisian Academy, the Odé. Cecilia and Netherlands) ples themselves (12 votes), and for www.sakhalinenergy.com/ mankind (123 votes). An encourage- ment to continue the fight to safeguard the area’s indigenous languages.

Sakha Republic It takes five hours to travel from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to Yakutsk, flying north from autumn to winter over a landscape with white rivers like deco- rative ribbons gently draped on snowy plains and mountains. In the Sakha Republic, with a surface of, roughly speaking, 3 million square kilometres, and a population of over one million, of which one third are Yakuts, large num- bers of ethnic groups speak their moth-

texts, songs, folkloristic narratives) that can be used be can that narratives) folkloristic songs, texts, safe- the for courseware develop to and research, for the In languages. given the of revitalizing and guarding in trips field on linguists native join will Odé future com- of means by material analyse and record to order on running processing speech for programmes puter laptops. Graaf de Tjeerd by 2000 in initiated was project The proj- similar to related is and University) (Groningen from ‘Voices Arctic. Northern the on focus that ects er tongue. Languages focused on in this project are the nearly extinct Yukagir (an isolated language), Evenki, and Even (Tungusic), which have fascinat- ing prosodic phenomena. For example, in Yukagir there is a gradual change from speaking to singing in the art of storytelling, where the intermediate phase between speaking and singing is particularly striking. In Yakutsk (Sakha Republic), at the Arctic Institute and the Institute of 29, November 2002, Odé Cecilia Northern Minorities Problems, Odé held workshops for students and researchers. After this workshop some students showed interest in the project

IIAS Newsletter and even seriously considered contin- In reported on the IIAS project ‘Voices from Tundra and Tundra from ‘Voices project IIAS the on reported a Taiga’, development programme for research on on focusing Asia, Northern in languages endangered Sakhalin of people the of cultures and languages the Repub- Sakha the and Evenki) and Nanai, Ulta, (Nivkh, Federa- Russian the in Even) and Evenki, (Yukagir, lic scientific a up build to is project the of aim The tion. digital phono- and video-library of ethnolinguistic spoken (e.g. internet the on and CD/DVD on materials uing to study local languages after their The Project in Brief in Project The

The Sakhalin Regional Museum, formerly the Karafuto-Cho Muse- um, was built in 1937 in the Japanese period.

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