News
June 24, 2023
Over 20 hours of interviews in Karelian and Russian recorded by scientists during an expedition to the Muezersky District of Karelia

Staff of the Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History KarRC RAS took an expedition to the Muezersky District, Republic of Karelia. Scientists collected linguistic and ethnographic materials, including more than 20 hours of interviews in Karelian and Russian. New samples of dialectal speech will supplement the audio map of the Open Veps and Karelian Corpus.
On June 12-18 employees of the Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History (ILLH) KarRC RAS Irina Novak, Yulia Litvin, Natalia Pellinen, and Fyodor Gerasimov went on a field trip to the Muezersky District of the Republic of Karelia. The scientists collected and refined materials of linguistic and ethnographic nature.

The researchers talked to people from the villages of Muezersky, Voloma, Tiksha, Ondozero, and Rugozero, and also had a chance to converse with informants born in other settlements of the district. As a result, more than 20 hours of interviews in Karelian and Russian were recorded.

– Regrettably, we must acknowledge that the Karelian language in the Muezersky District has been preserved less than in areas where they speak Karelian Proper, such as the Medvezhjegorsky and Kalevalsky Districts of Karelia or the Tver Region., – told Natalia Pellinen, Junior Researcher at Linguistics Section ILLH KarRC RAS.

One of the outputs of the trip are the newly recorded dialectal speech samples for the audio map created in connection with the Spoken Corpus of Balto-Finnic Languages of Karelia – a open collection of sounded texts in different dialects of Karelian and Veps with mark-up and Russian translations. This corpus, in turn, will constitute an essential part of the VepKar web portal.


Expedition members with their interlocutors in Voloma village library

Senior Researcher at Ethnology Section ILLH KarRC RAS Yulia Litvin collected ten interviews with Karelian women on topics of women’s daily life, as well as on ethnic identity matters. The scientist explains that the interest in the topic of identity is due to the historically formed ethnic heterogeneity of the population of the present-day Muezersky District. On the one hand, Karelian population has lived there for a long time, and on the other hand, some settlements appeared in the 1950s-1960s, when a branch line of the Oktyabrskaya railroad was built to facilitate the return of "special resettlers" as workforce for the forest industry. Migrants to the republic of the "green gold" came not only from other parts of Karelia, but also from other Soviet republics.

The expedition was implemented within Russian Science Foundation regional project ¹ 22-28-20215 “Creating a spoken corpus of Balto-Finnic languages of Karelia” (Project Leader – Alexandra Rodionova, Researcher, ILLH KarRC RAS). Details about the trip can be found in the travel diary published in the ILLH young scientists' community in VK.

Photos from expedition participants’ archives

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