The fate of Forest Enets – a short comment

[Florian Siegl]

Thanks for Trond's feedback. Some follow-up commentaries on Trond's 
comments.

> The natural follow-up question here is to what extent the younger 
> forest enets are interested in participating in revitalisation work, 
> or, rather, what kind of revitalisation they would be interested in.
Frankly speaking, there is no interest at all in the language in the 
generation younger than 40. A young Forest Enets girl has been showing 
constant interest in the "culture" of her mother but not in the language 
and although she sings once a Forest Enets songs on folklore festivals 
in Dudinka and Noril'sk this is actually all she knows about the 
language. Interest in whatever aspect of Forest Enets culture and 
langauge is present only in Dudinka and the Forest Enets intelligentsia 
itself is using the old Boasian "salvage anthropology" metaphors of 
documenting everything one still remembers. In Potapovo nothing like 
this can be encountered...

>> Language endangerment has resulted in the emancipation of native 
>> speakers who no longer see themselves as “something” to be studied. 
>> Whereas this trend has started in other parts of the world already in 
>> the late 1970s this understanding has arrived in Russia by now.
>>
> (Side note: The emancipation probably has other causes.) It would be 
> interesting hering more about to what extent this understanding "has 
> arrived", i.e., to what extent speakers and descendants of speakers 
> really are perpared to change their behaviour, and in what way.

Trond, language planning for indigenous languages of Russia was 
something centralized during the period of the Soviet union which meant 
involvement of Leningrad and Moscow (experimental primers etc). It is no 
surprise that literacy for Nganasan and Forest Enets (and for several 
other languages too) started only after the collapse of the USSR as it 
obviously became easier to publish anything, especially locally. But for 
compiling one needs published materials and perhaps a linguist or two to 
assist which at least the Nganasans had. Besides, the overall starting 
point for Nganasan was much better than for Enets...
In the Enets case, Labanauskas in Dudinka became active and started 
publishing some primary materials before finally Sorokina did the same 
but it was the "periphery" which started to the work on its own...

A short note on my quotation from Heath...

> Here, there is a misunderstanding. The "long grammatical studies" 
> referred to in the Australian case are not "modern grammars" in the 
> sense of "reference grammars", they are treatises of the type "is 
> there a VP in Dyirbal or not" (or, equally irrelevant, "the history of 
> Mansi vowels"). If descendants of next generations' forest enets would 
> like to restore their ancestors' language (like Cornishmen do), they 
> would need both texts, dictnionary, AND a reference grammar. 
Of course technical statements, /is language X non-configurational, 
split-ergative/ or /allows raising to object /is something that native 
speakers are not interested in (/including has Dyirbal VPs/)...
I don't think that I have misunderstood or misused this particular 
Australian example. Whereas the involvement of general approaches to 
Australian languages has been of course very intensive and Australian 
languages have played a decisive role in the formation of linguistic 
thought since the late 1960s, it is a fact that any well documented 
Australian language has a much more sophisticated grammar published than 
most of the Uralic languages (I'm not so sure about text collections and 
dictionaries...). What I want to say is: *Grammar writing for Australian 
languages is quite usual, apart from producing "long grammatical studies"...
*
> Now, language revitalisation certainly is more than computers 
> (languages are preserved by being spoken), and linguistics certainly 
> is more than computer  linguistics. Rather than trying to give a 
> coherent picture of the "new" role of the linguist, I have mentioned 
> one tiny part of it, along with the observation that in order to be 
> able to rewrite the grammar as an automaton, I will need a 
> comprehensive generative grammar (in the classical meaning of the 
> word, which is "explicict grammar") of the language in question.
>
Well, in a nutshell Trond has subsumed the discussion of documentary 
linguistics from the last 10-15 years and many things proposed here a 
actually already standards (of course varying). Just to reformulate a 
central factor: for dynamic communities with a will to preserve their 
language computers have to be integrated. BUT linguists can't reverse 
language attitudes within the community and even the best parser, 
speller, corpus can't prevent language death if the community does not 
use them or does not know how to use them. Functional literacy of 
indigenous languages of the Russian North and Far East translates as a) 
having a primer b) having a collection of folklore c) having a small 
dictionary d) having a newspaper (which actually few people read) and 
PCs are not yet standards (especially not in the tundra) and neither is 
internet...

> With the observation that the classical uralic diciplines of language 
> history, extensive dictionaries and text editions actually may be of 
> interest to the speech community (admittedly provided that it is 
> communicated back to them after the fieldwork), and that grammars may 
> be relevant, albeit indirectly, as basis for other activities, I 
> conclude in a slightly more optimistic tone than did Florian. To me it 
> seems we do have something to report back to the language communities, 
> and we might as well starting doing just that.
Again, return your findings is the magic word which is something quite 
usual (of course Trond correctly said that his should be done in a 
format and language known to the community). During an informal meeting 
with the Forest Enets intelligentsia in early March in Dudinka I handed 
them over a set of CDs which contained all my sound recordings 
(featuring of course their relatives in the village) and a CD with 
scanned articles (PDF) on their language and ethnology (I spotted some 
drastic gaps in Dudinka concerning literature during my stay in Feb 
2006). Whereas this was quite natural to me, it evoked a big sensation 
among any of the indigenous people in Dudinka as I was the first one who 
did this. For them researchers are people who come unexpectedly, stay 
for a short period collecting information and leave (never to be seen 
again). The fact that I already left them something was highly 
appreciated. I think already the fact that nowadays one speaks about 
consultants and no longer about informants makes clear that a linguist 
and a community member are a joint-venture!

I'll finish with a general comment for the whole list that I consider 
most urgent for others who think about returning their findings and 
depositing their materials locally within the boundaries of the Russian 
Federation. DO NOT deposit your findings exclusively at local museums or 
cultural institutions as they will archive these materials in the usual 
way NOT MAKING IT AVAILABLE TO ANYBODY. Make sure that several copies 
are distributed among local community members which actually need these 
materials. My personal experience with Russian Archives shows that 
archives are still meant to be graves, once you put something into an 
archive you won't be able to get anything out...

Best wishes,

Florian Siegl
www.ut.ee/~flos
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