200 Videos for Memory's Sake
Freiburg, Mar 15, 2017
Credit: University of Freiburg
In the European part of Northern Russia, the Komi-Izhemtsy people rarely pass their dialect on to younger generations. Linguists at the University of Freiburg have recorded this dialect in a video database as part of a project with the University of Uppsala in Sweden and the Academy of State Administration for the Republic of Komi in Syktyvkar, Russia.
Credit: University of Freiburg
Fewer than 200,000 people can speak Komi, a language whose origins are found in the easternmost parts of Europe in a region between Barents See and the Ural mountains. Together with his working group at the University of Freiburg and researchers from the University of Uppsala in Sweden and the Academy of State Governance for the Republic of Komi in Syktyvkar, Russia, the linguist Dr. Michael Rießler from the Department of Scandinavian Studies has documented the dialect of the Komi-Izhemtsy that is spoken in the Republic of Komi as well as in various linguistic enclaves outside the Republic. Komi belongs to the same language family as Finnish and Hungarian. The dialect spoken by the Komi-Izhemtsy – along with the Komi standard language – is nearly extinct. The team asked the population in the European part of Northern Russia to tell their life stories in Komi. The result was a series of about 200 videos and transcribed conversations that the researchers are now successively publishing in a database open to the public.
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The videos were transcribed in Komi, and include translations in Russian and English. The database's accompanying website is also available in several languages. That way linguists and other interested parties are able to utilize the recordings both within as well as outside of the Komi Republic. The project was financed by the Kone Foundation in Finland with a 175.000 Euro grant from 2014 to 2016.
Michael Rießler's work continues: As a fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), he plans to work together with his group to analyze the recordings and to study the relationship between the standard language and the Komi dialects. This effort will also be financed by the Kone Foundation. The goal is to understand the varying grammatical rules across the different linguistic variants. The researchers will unify their own recordings with older dialect recordings as well as literary works and newspaper texts written in standard Komi to create a language corpus including several million words. They will then analyze the data with computer linguistic methods.
Sonja Seidel