Macrosociolinguistics and Minority Languages

The study is dedicated to the prerequisites and results of the Interregional Marathon of Vepsian and Karelian speech recordings “Listening to my native dialect” (January - October 2023). An important component of the policy of preserving the autochthonous languages of the Republic of Karelia is the enrichment with new audio samples of the Baltic-Finnish Speech Corpus developed on the basis of the “Open corpus of Veps and Karelian languages” (VepKar). The speech corpus was developed by the staff of the Institute for the Language of Literature and History and the Institute of Applied Mathematical Research. The corpus includes a collection of spoken texts in different dialects of the Karelian and Vepsian languages, provided with transcription, markup and translation into Russian. The corpus also contains search filters necessary for work (search by language/dialect, place and year of recording, informant and collector, source). Researchers use three main sources to fill the corpus with audio recordings of Karelian and Vepsian speech: audiocollections of the Phonogram Archive of the ILLH KRC RAS, audiorecordings of broadcasts in the Karelian language, as well as field materials of the authors recorded during the expeditions. In order to replenish the corpus map with new audio fragments and ensure a decrease in public interest in the dialects of the Karelian and Vepsian languages was held the “Listening to my native dialect” marathon. Everyone was invited to the latter, who could register both themselves and take part in the role of collectors. The purpose of this study, firstly, is to analyze the results of the marathon as a tool for popularizing and improving the status of the indigenous languages of Karelia, and secondly, as a tool for documenting these languages, which resulted in a collection of recordings of Vepsian and Karelian speech, collected in a linguistic corpus.

The study on the basis of documents of the National Archives of the Republic of Karelia considers factors of influence and vectors of language policy in Soviet Karelia of the first half of the 20s of the XX century. The border position of Karelia, the lack of standard forms of Karelian language, significant interdialect differences, uneven level of Russian proficiency in the southern and northern regions of Karelia have created a specific sociolinguistic configuration in the region. The lack of Karelian intelligentsia was also creating additional difficulty in planning language policy measures, making it virtually impossible to organize education in Karelian. The main purpose of the study was to identify the dominant ideologies of language construction on the ground in their interaction with the viewpoint of the central government. The study focuses on the narratives of language policy actors related to the elimination of illiteracy and the language organization of schooling. In this regard, a number of documents from the early to mid-20s period were analyzed, in particular the minutes of meetings of the congresses of county commissioners for public education, the minutes of meetings of commissions for public education at different levels, reports of county, hair and provincial subdivisions of public education, the minutes of the meeting of residents of volosts, etc. The study introduces into scientific circulation previously unpublished archival material on the identified issues, which illustrates the opposing narratives and ideology of language construction in Soviet Karelia, both among representatives of the government in the broad sense of the word, and on the axis of ‟power” - ‟people”.