ENDANGERED LANGUAGES AND THE USE OF SOUND ARCHIVES AND FIELDWORK DATA FOR THEIR DOCUMENTATION AND REVITALISATION: VOICES FROM TUNDRA AND TAIGA

The research program Voices from Tundra and Taiga has been devoted to the study of endangered languages and cultures of the Russian Federation, which must be described rapidly before they become extinct. This research is in the fortunate position that earlier work on the reconstruction technology for old sound recordings found in archives in St. Petersburg has made it possible to compare languages still spoken in the proposed research area to the same languages as they were spoken more than half a century ago. We have prepared a catalogue of the existing recordings, and a phono and video library of recorded stories, and of the folklore, singing and oral traditions of some minority peoples in the Russian Federation and its bordering areas. For this purpose, the existing sound recordings in the archives have been used together with the results obtained from new fieldwork expeditions. At present, many old recordings still remain hidden in private archives and places where the quality of preservation is not guaranteed. In a research project on Endangered Archives, we make part of these recordings available and add them to the database developed in St. Petersburg. The aim of the project is to re-record the material on sound carriers according to up-to-date technology and store them in a safe place together with the metadata. The storage facility provided by the project will modernise the possible archiving activities in the Russian Federation and bring them up-to-date with the present world standards. The data are added to the existing archive material in St. Petersburg and part of it is presented on the internet and/or CDROM. This material thus becomes available for further analysis to researchers working in the field of phonetics, linguistics, anthropology, history, ethnomusicology and folklore. The information is also important for the development of teaching methods for representatives of the related ethnic groups and for the conservation and revitalisation of their language and culture. In this paper, we shall also consider some background data about endangered languages and the results of our projects for various cases, such as for the Paleo-asiatic languages Ainu and Nivkh which are represented in Eastern Asia.