Syllabus
1. The Dolgans: history, ethnohistory, research history, sociolinguistic status-quo
2. Phonology, morphonology, parts of speech
3. Nominal categories and their morphosyntax
4. Verbal categories and their morphosyntax
5. Syntactic preliminaries a) Predication: verbal, non-verbal and semi-verbal predication b) object marking c) valency decreasing and increasing operations d) subordination
6. Analysis of a written text and a spontaneous narrative
7. Dolgan and language contact a) Dolgan's multiple substrates: Evenki, Russian, Taimyr Samoyedic b) Topic marking via 2nd person possessive marking - an unusual instance of language contact with Taimyr Samoyedic
Annotation
Florian Siegl
UiT - Norges arktiske universitet
Dolgan is a small Turkic language of Northern Siberia. The language is claimed to be spoken by roughly 5000 individuals in the Taimyr municipal district (Krasnojarskij kraj) and the adjacent Anabar ulus in the Saxa Republic.
Although the Dolgans are politically classified as a “less-numeric people” distinct from Saxa (Yakut), the status of
Dolgan as an independent language and not as a dialect of Yakut is not unanimously agreed on. To a large degree, this discussion is symptomatic for the state of documentation of Dolgan as the language lacks both a comprehensive grammar and a comprehensive dictionary. Although the relation of Dolgan to Yakut will be occasionally touched upon during the lectures, the course offers a structural-functional introduction to the basic structure of Dolgan. The materials derive from the lecturer's unpublished fieldmaterials gathered during fieldwork in Dudinka (2008, 2011) and consultant work in Helsinki (2013) which is amended with data from recent educational materials and excerpts from contemporary written Dolgan.