Grammatical Descriptions, Corpora, and Language Technology for Indigenous Northern Eurasian Languages

Project homepage: https://inel.corpora.uni-hamburg.de/

Goal
Providing language resources for indigenous languages and creating a digital research infrastructure for the use of these resources.

Project description
The territory of the Russian Federation is home to a wide variety of indigenous languages, of which some are spoken actively by only a few inhabitants of the region and others are acutely endangered, if not extinct.
The existence of these languages has been documented in numerous materials, including handwritten texts, analog sound recordings, word lists, etc., which are currently located in archives and collections (e.g. in Hamburg, Helsinki, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tartu and Tomsk). The discovery and development of these resources – in some cases even the documentation of their existence – is one of the initial activities that INEL has been pursuing since the beginning of 2016. Using the latest methods of digital data processing, the unique data contained in the collections are being collected, partially scaled, digitized and enriched with a wealth of other linguistic information. The resulting digital empirical data collections (corpora) will be made permanently available online in an interdisciplinary network. INEL acts as a bridge between the exploration of indigenous languages and the international partner institutions.

Cooperation partner
University of Hamburg

Principal Investigator
Prof. Dr. Beáta Wagner-Nagy

Financing
The long-term project is funded within the framework of the Academies’ Programme, which is coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.

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