A song of marriage and setting up a house. A proto-Dolgan song recorded by K.M. Rychkov

Abstract

The Dolgan language, a small Turkic language in far north Russia, has experienced a complicated process of language formation caused by close language contact, mixture, language shift, and so on. The number of speakers is about 5000– 6000, according to the 2002 Russian census. The language is not so different from Yakut. However, the Dolgan language plays a role in supporting the identity of the Dolgan people. A linguist, social activist, and ethnographer Konstantin Mikhajlovich Rychkov (1882–1923) recorded abundant linguistic and ethnographic materials about Samoyed, Tungusic, and Turkic peoples in Siberia at the beginning of the 20th century. His fieldwork records are now preserved at the Museum of Ethnography and the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (both institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences) in St. Petersburg. In this paper, I report a song of marriage in proto-Dolgan found among the unpublished linguistic material compiled by Rychkov. Here, the text of the song is in three ways: 1) transcribed text by Rychkov with its Romanised transliteration; 2) edited text with identified words; 3) meaning of the text (my translation), though almost of all these three are so far tentative. The photos of the text by Rychkov are also attached. In this song, we can see some characteristics of the linguistic environment at the time.