Ob-Ugric Field Trip and New Bilingual Corpora
n November 2023, as part of the postdoctoral program and the DIAL2 laboratory project, Natalia Koshelyuk traveled to the Ob-Ugrian region to collect new field data. The city of Khanty-Mansiysk was chosen as the primary location, and the focus of the study was the Russian speech of the Mansi and Khanty people.
During the week-long field trip, 13 hours of audio recordings were collected. All informants with whom N. Koshelyuk was able to communicate were bilingual, using both Russian and the Khanty or Mansi languages in their daily lives and professional activities.
The recordings of Russian speech were conducted in an open-ended format. Most conversations revolved around everyday topics such as family, work, hobbies, and culture. For example, it was discovered that gardening and cycling are popular activities among middle-aged Mansi and Khanty individuals. Many of them are also engaged in creative writing, publishing their own collections of fairy tales, songs, legends, and translations of well-known literary works into their native languages.
Additionally, Khanty-Mansiysk hosts annual festivals and celebrations dedicated to traditional culture. The most renowned of these is the Bear Festival, about which Natalia Koshelyuk has now gained extensive knowledge.
Now, anyone can explore the daily lives of the Ob-Ugrian people in Khanty-Mansiysk and listen to their Russian speech, as all materials have been processed and published on the laboratory's website.
For more details about the interviews, visit the following links:
Khanty bilingual corpus – https://lingconlab.ru/khantyrus/#!/
Mansi bilingual corpus – https://lingconlab.ru/MansiRus/#!/
