Languages of the Tajmyr peninsula
Institute of Linguistics, Moscow
Tajmyr is a peninsula of 800,000 km2 in the North of Central Siberia. It is the northernmost part of Eurasia, now inhabited just by 32,000 people, a third of whom recognize themselves as indigenous peoples of Siberia. It is home for five languages from three language families (Uralic: Tundra Nenets, Enets, Nganasan; Turkic: Dolgan; Tungusic: Evenki), and we know of at least two more Tajmyrian languages, Yurak (Samoyedic) and Govorka (a Russian-based pidgin), that are now extinct. All ethnic groups inhabiting Tajmyr used to be nomadic, depending on reindeer husbandry, fishing, and hunting. This peninsula is an extremely interesting object for areal linguistics, as all peoples of the area were in contact with each other and had been moving in several directions, changing their traditional territories and their neighbors several times within the last 400 years. Noteworthy, the very understanding of the notion of contact is different for nomadic peoples in northern tundras, as compared to other areas of the world. In this lecture series, you will learn about ethnic and linguistic history of Tajmyr and will get acquainted with details of linguistic structures of all languages spoken here, including the Russian-based pidgin Govorka and the atypical Turkic language Dolgan, where Evenki and Nganasan substrates are particularly visible. The final lecture will be devoted to multilingualism of Tajmyr in the past and traces it has left in structures of the languages involved.
Course plan:
Lecture 1: Ethnic and linguistic history of Tajmyr, an overview of the Russian-based pidgin Govorka
Lecture 2: Structure of the Samoyedic languages spoken on Tajmyr (Tundra Nenets, Tundra Enets, Forest Enets, Nganasan)
Lecture 3: Structure of Evenki (Tungusic) and Dolgan (Turkic)
Lecture 4: Multilingualism and language contact