Sakha Language Research Articles

Ohuokhai: Transmitter of Biocultural Heritage for Sakha of Northeastern Siberia

Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Siberia, Russia, practice a circle dance called ohuokhai that is fueled by improvisatory song. Although it is typically bracketed by regular introductory and closing stanzas, its improvisatory middle is a communicative forum for the lead singer to report, critique, and prophesize on issues relevant to the dancers she/he leads. In Soviet times, this middle section often contained expressions of discontent masked by the linguistic complexity of the Sakha language compared to Russian. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the improvisatory texts speak to issues of the environmental crises resulting from the Soviet period and of the increasingly obvious effects of climate change on local lands, ecosystems, and Sakhas' horse and cattle breeding subsistence economy. In this article, I discuss my personal experience with ohuokhai and how it first drew me to work with Viliui Sakha, Sakha living adjacent to the Viliui river and with whom I have collaborated since 1991. My early findings detailed the circle dance's role in Sakha culture and the power it maintained through the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In this article, I build upon the cultural and historical background I established in my previous research to highlight how ohuokhai can also be considered a perpetuator of biocultural knowledge for the Viliui Sakha. The longitudinal arc of my work with Sakha brings new understandings to ohuokhai, its ethnobiological threads, and its crucial role in transmitting biocultural heritage over generations.

СЕМАНТИЧЕСКОЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВО ЛЕКСИКИ МАТЕРИАЛЬНОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ В СОВРЕМЕННОМ ЯЗЫКЕ САХА (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ ЖИЛЫХ ПОСТРОЕК)

The article deals with the semantic space of the lexemes included in the lexical-semantic group with the meaning “housing”. Housing as one of the most important components of the people’s material culture is of great interest in terms of determining the importance of semantic features in an ethnic group’s spiritual culture. After analysing the lexemes that form the notional field “housing”, we can say that the lexical-semantic group “housing” of the Sakha language represents ethnic ideas related to the people’s economic-cultural activity not only in the structure of the primary nomination, but also in the methods of the secondary nomination of real-world facts.

Языковые установки саха в сфере образования в контексте современных экстралингвистических реалий (по материалам опросов в г. Якутске)

В статье представлены результаты социолингвистических исследований автора 2007–2008 гг., 2014 и 2016 гг.— общественного мнения жителей и экспертов г. Якутска — представителей саха (якутов) относительно языковых предпочтений в сфере дошкольного и школьного образования. Тем самым автор определяет степень витальности языка саха, языковой лояльности его современных носителей.Если в 2008 г. большинство респондентов поддерживали стратегию раннего приобщения в детсаде к русскому языку с преподаванием разговорного якутского языка, в 2014 г. наблюдается установка на смешанное обучение и воспитание в детском саду, достаточно сильна и установка на этническую среду. Зафиксирован рост языковой лояльности якутского городского сообщества, стремление к созданию условий для этнокультурного развития. Однако реальность такова, что якутский язык обучения на всех ступенях с 1 по 11 класс в условиях г. Якутска невозможен и остается в ответах респондентов как желательное условие.Проанализированы приоритеты государственной языковой политики на уровне России и Республики Саха (Якутия) в области образования. Отмечается, что в Законе «О языках в Республике Саха (Якутия)» жителям республики гарантируется свободный выбор языка воспитания и обучения. Обеспечение конституционных прав на обучение на родном языке возлагается на власти республики. На практике наблюдаются проблемы административно-правовой базы, недостатка учебно-методического обеспечения, уровня профессиональной подготовки учителей якутского языка.

Принципы описания терминологии языка саха в лингвистике 1920—1940-х годов

The features of term studies formation in the works of researchers of the Sakha language in the 1920-1940-ies are considered. It is reported that at this time, a lot of work was done to develop the theoretical foundations and principles of creating the terms of the Sakha language, as well as a large number of terms in various fields of knowledge, especially in the socio-political sphere. It is emphasized that terminology complexes have been developed in all subjects in the volume of high school. It is shown that these goals were achieved relatively quickly because of the Yakut intelligentsia leaders of terms construction, who recognized the great importance of this work, enthusiastically took up the work and led others. Among leaders there were now well-known figures of language and - wider - cultural construction: A. E. Kulakovskiy, S. A. Novgorodov, A. A. Ivanov (Күндэ), G. V. Baishev (known by literary pseudonym Altan Saryn) and P. A. Oyunskiy. The article notes that each of these scientists went his own way, had his own priorities. Based on the results of the review, it is proved that the activity on the Yakut terminology system development was initially focused on two main ways of terminology fund formation: the use of internal language resources and borrowing of terms from other languages, in particular Russian. The article attempts to analyse dictionaries compiled by figures of linguistic construction of 1920-1940 from the point of view of the theory of modern thermography in order to optimize typical and composite parameters of terminological dictionaries.

School-based linguistic and cultural revitalization as a local practice: Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk, Russian Federation

In the 1990s, efforts were launched in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation to support the revival of Sakha (Yakut) language education. This interdisciplinary study examines the evolution of school-based Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk over a 25-year period beginning with the launching of the first reforms in the 1990s. Language education reform in the capital city has been shaped by a dynamic interplay between federal, regional, and local factors. Grassroots social and cultural activism continues to play a key role in school-based language revitalization in Yakutsk, influencing how policies have been received and implemented at the local level. Local community stakeholders are working together to counteract federal education policies, which direct school resources away from minority language education. This case study shows that the Sakha (Yakut) language revival has taken root in the capital city, and it provides important evidence that civic activism continues to develop in urban areas of the republic.

Tracking the parallelism of difference with ostension schemes

In this paper I develop an instrument for monolingual elicitation through ostension. I call the instrument an ostension scheme. Ostension schemes are matrices with rows to introduce pictures and columns to represent sentences. Ostension schemes have utility for monolingual elicitation of an unfamiliar language and they allow for the collection and storage of certain kinds of linguistic data in a particularly transparent fashion that does not primarily utilize translation. This transparency is due to design features which help distinguish between a sentence and its entailments or between a sentence and precizations of that sentence. The data stored on an ostension scheme allows access to the linguistic hierarchy at the level of the basic sentence. Comparison of minimal sentence pairs allows for movement within the linguistic hierarchy, from the level of the basic sentence to the level of the morpheme or the phoneme. Ostension schemes utilize a principle I call the parallelism of difference. By this principle, minimal differences in the forms of basic sentences tend to correspond to minimal differences in situations described by these sentences. I take up the problem of how to determine these minimal differences. I demonstrate how ostension schemes have been used to elicit a number of sentences from the Sakha language (Yakut) and to identify morphemes in the language, and I also provide a brief discussion of overcoming first language bias of the designer of the scheme. Finally, I consider how the rows and columns of ostension schemes interact and how this interaction facilitates elicitation. The instrument as developed here promises to be highly practical, but at the same time it is limited in the kind of language it can be used to elicit. The theoretical investigation should be useful not only by engaging in fundamental issues of language study but also by paving the way for possibly broader applications of these ostension schemes.

What language advertises: ethnographic branding in the linguistic landscape of Yakutsk

Yakutsk, capital of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District, was often described in 19th and early 20th century accounts as being unique in the Russian Empire in that it was not a solely “Russian” city; rather, it was a Sakha (Yakut) place. Its population, Russian and Sakha alike, were conversant in the local Sakha language during that earlier period, though over the Soviet era, progressively stricter policies of Russification led to communicative norms shifting and the Sakha language becoming less visible (and audible) in this urban centre. Using a survey of Yakutsk’s linguistic landscape in 2013–2015, we analyse the presence of Sakha and the indexical meanings connected to its usage; examples from the commercial sphere suggests it is becoming prominent in a campaign of “ethnographic branding” (Manning and Uplisashvili in Am Anthropol 109(4):626–641, 2007) that relies on significant Sakha historical figures, cosmological concepts, as well as references to the rural (and Sakha-associated) spaces of the Republic to create a sense of “Sakha-ness” in the city. Though Russian remains dominant within the linguistic landscape of the city both when considering top-down and bottom-up policy and planning, we draw attention to the places where Sakha is indeed being used to reveal the dynamics of creating a more “Sakha” Yakutsk, and create a kind of “commodified” authenticity (see Heller in Annu Rev Anthropol 39:101–104, 2010; Heller et al. in J Socioling 18(4):539–566, 2014; Coupland in J Socioling 7(3):417–431, 2003).

Language Has a Spirit: Sakha (Yakut) Language Ideologies and Aesthetics of Sustenance

Since the end of the Soviet period, usage of the Sakha (Yakut) language has become once again more widespread in its usage in both the public and private spheres in the Republic of Sakha-Yakutia. Language ideologies that circulated in the Soviet era focused on the rodnoi iazyk (Russian: native language); this paper examines the contact and interplay of these ideologies with indigenous Sakha beliefs about the nature of language and the reciprocal relationship between a speaker and their language(s), which involves mutual sustenance and protection. The concept of agency in language is discussed, in light of both the belief in the agentive powers possessed by the tyl ichichite (Sakha: spirit of language), and in terms of how bilingual Sakha-Russian speakers make choices about their communicative practices in terms of style and register, which has repercussions for the sustainability of the Sakha language as a whole.

Sakha language and education in a social, cultural and political context

This paper analyses the language situation in the Republic of Sakha, Russian Far East. Due economic, social and political processes, Sakha language occupies at least two niches in the society – as a language of disadvataged low social strata and as a language for the national elite. The paper demonstrates that one language can have several social positions simultaneously in an envirounment where multiple social, economic and political factors determe the social and cultural identity of its speakers. The role of education and access to the good quality schools is in the Republic of Sakha more crucial in creating a social status of the speakers and their language than official national language policy. Our paper is critical to sociolinguistic theories of “killer languages”, language utility, code switching and other theories that see a language group as homogenous body acting as a unit. The Sakha case demonstrates that in reality language speakers do not form a coherent group and the status of their language can vary according to the social position of the speakers. The paper also shows that processes we call “elitarisation” and “lumpenisation” of the language are intermingled and that people can move from one language strata into another using various strategies. As a result we conclude that in multilingual environment, education system is important as an institution that affects people’s life paths via networks they are able to establish in school or social groups they study with.

Metaphoric Models of the Concept FIRE in Sakha and English Languages

The article deals with the study of concept FIRE in Sakha and English languages. Basing on the theory of conceptual metaphor the authors singled out metaphoric models of representation of concept FIRE in both cultures. The two languages have common universal and differential specific ways of conceptualizing the concept under study. They depend on the structure of both languages and also on cultural and historic background. The Sakha language displays pagan conception of fire as a living being expressed in the models FIRE IS A HUMAN BEING, FIRE IS AN OLD MAN. The metaphoric models found in the English language are connected with materialistic conception of fire in the models FIRE IS A MATERIAL OBJECT. The examples of personification in English convey humanlike characteristics of fire which is able to consume, dance, sweep, kill, die, etc. The Christian religion of the English reveals itself in the metaphoric model FIRE IS HELL which is a well-known allusion to the Bible. The identified models might be valuable for cross-cultural studies and cognitive linguistics.

“Is It Bad That We Try to Speak Two Languages?”: Language Ideologies and Choices among Urban Sakha Bilingual Families

This article discusses urban ethnic Sakha bilinguals and their language ideologies and choices, especially with regard to the language socialization of their children—both at home and within the educational system. The usage of the Sakha language within urban spaces has been on the rise in the post-Soviet years, but still tends to be acquired in the home environment as a first language, whereas Russian is acquired later in the public sphere and reinforced in the educational system. The article explores some of the ideological and structural barriers toward Sakha acquisition and maintenance that speakers face, with apprehension regarding bilingualism and the mastery of two languages in educational contexts being a key concern for many Sakha parents. The article also discusses language instruction—especially in schools—in light of the need to begin to accommodate those with little or no Sakha knowledge in order to continue to increase the usage of Sakha by urban speakers.

Локативные конструкции с показателем дательного падежа в якутском языке

Локативные конструкции с показателем дательного падежа в якутском языке

Средства выражения косвенной эвиденциальности в якутском языке

Средства выражения косвенной эвиденциальности в якутском языке