Abstract
Tundra Yukagir is a nearly extinct language spoken in the utmost northeast of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). The population is approximately 700, but at present the number of good speakers is dramatically low with some 50 people still speaking their mother tongue properly. Tundra Yukagir forms, with Kolyma Yukagir, an isolated Paleo-Asian language family. Despite typological correspondences, Tundra and Kolyma Yukagir are mutually unintelligible due to large differences in both lexicon and morphology that presumably date back some two millennia. Tundra Yukagir is a unique language for its prosody in traditional narrative techniques. For example, in narratives, speaking gradually changes into singing. This exceptional intermediate stage between speaking and singing in storytelling has never been registered and analysed. In Tundra Yukagir speech some more prosodic features on utterance and on word level have been observed that have never been experimentally verified and described: prosodic marking of focus, especially by means of intonation, and discrete differences between short and long vowels and between long vowels and diphtongs. Further objectives of the proposed research are: a description of the language based on a transcribed spoken corpus with, for above mentioned reasons, special emphasis on prosody; a contribution to answering the typological question whether the Yukagir language family is isolated or possibly related to Altaic or Uralic languages; digital audiovisual recordings of traditional and daily life narratives; digital recording of a spoken dictionary; in cooperation with local linguists: development of courseware for the revitalization of the language. Using a laptop with the required software, a digital videocamera and CD-recorder, the research methodology is linguistic fieldwork (recordings, interviews, elicitation, transcription and analysis, translations into English and Russian) with native speakers and local linguists. The results will be published on a CD/DVD (also on the Internet) and in a textbook with the collected linguistic materials, and can be used by scientists, teachers and students, and members of the local Tundra Yukagir community (capacity building).