History of Research on the Eastern Khanty Language

This article presents an overview of the history of studies focusing on the Eastern dialects of Khanty, namely, Vakh, Vasyugan, Surgut and Salym. These studies cover the timespan stretching between the nineteenth century and the present time. This long-standing tradition of studying Khanty dialects has contributed to accumulating enormous language data collected by distinguished researchers from Russia, Hungary, Finland and Germany among others. The objective of this article is to systematize the accumulated language data on the Eastern Khanty dialects which have been studied by certain linguistic groups or schools. The language data include both already published and unpublished data on Eastern Khanty language collected by Russian and foreign scholars. Moreover, the archive materials of the Scientific Library of TSU, the Laboratory of Siberian Indigenous Languages named after A.P. Dulson at TSPU and the field data collected by researchers from the Laboratory of Linguistic Anthropology at TSU were also used. The article focuses on tracking the history of studies of Khanty dialects that were grounded in field work data. Interest in ethnography, spiritual culture and folklore of the indigenous population of Siberia stimulated the flow of scientists to the middle Ob region of the Agan, Tromyugan, Pim, Lyamin, Bolshoi Yugan, Malyi Yugan, Vakh and Vasyugan river basins in the second half of the nineteenth century. Initially, researchers tended to record the lexicon of the relevant dialects, as well as to collect ethnographical, anthropological and archeological facts. This practice was soon expanded to encompass morphological and phonetic features as well. Due to these attempts, present-day researchers have access to a range of grammar books and dictionaries enabling them to do comparative analyses of the language data obtained at different time periods. The first grammar guides of the East Khanty language were written by Finnish scholars (A.M. Kastren, K.F. Karjalainen and H. Paasonen) at the beginning of the twentieth century. They managed to describe the grammar systems of Surgut, Yugan, Vakh, Vasyugan and Trom-Yugan dialects. In the middle of the twenties century Eastern dialects were already intensively studied by Hungarian, German and Russian scholars. Scientists from Germany (W. Steinitz), Hungary (L. Honti, J. Gulya) and others came to research Eastern Khanty to the Institute of the Peoples of the North in Leningrad. The language material collected during field work was comprehensively studied by both individual scientists and scientific groups formed to study individual dialects. Currently, scientists continue the tradition of collecting linguistic data from the East Khanty speakers which is made freely available on the sites of the projects aimed at examining the indigenous languages, in the form of online dictionaries and text corpuses. The article also presents an overview of the research tasks addressed during field work with the Eastern Khanty speakers and identifies the main areas of research activity of contemporary linguists. Eastern Khanty dialects are known to have been described to a varying degree of completeness. The Surgut dialect is being actively studied and recorded by Hungarian and Russian scientists from Novosibirsk, Khanty-Mansiysk and Surgut, and the Vakh - by Russian scientists from Tomsk. Vasyugan Khanty is no longer in use as a means of communication; therefore, researchers draw their analyses on the texts and materials collected during the twentieth century. The least comprehensively described Eastern Khanty dialect is known to be Salym, which can be accounted for by the fact that it ceased being used as a means of communication among native speakers a long time ago. This dialect is in a disadvantageous position since researchers have been unable to assemble a valid text corpus of this language as well as to do its complete description.

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