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Lyubov BADMAYEVA
Head of the Department of Linguistics,
Institute of Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies,
Russian Academy of Sciences (Siberian Branch)
(UlanUde, Russian Federation)
Yulia ABAYEVA
Research Fellow, Department of Linguistics,
Institute of Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies,
Russian Academy of Sciences (Siberian Branch)
(UlanUde, Russian Federation)
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Modern Linguistic Technology to Help Preserve Buryat
Language: Corpora & Database Developments 77
Modern information technology provides linguists with broad opportunities
both for doing research and building textual corpora and databases online.
Such opportunities have been efficiently used within the framework of corpus
linguistics for several decades now. The accessibility of open-source content on
the Internet can facilitate and speed up the material-gathering routine while
bringing out new aspects to be explored.
Nowadays, corpus technology offers excellent opportunities for representing
any language online, for purposes such as research, education and, of course,
preservation.
In our age of globalization, smaller languages often find themselves sidelined, and
Buryat – one of Russia’s minor languages – is no exception. Bringing such languages
online in open-access corpora and databases may prove an effective solution.
The promotion of language diversity in cyberspace could also help preserve
native speaker communities’ distinctiveness and identity, so developing online
linguistic resources for small and community languages should be seen as an
important state-level task.
Adopted by Buryatia’s government in August 2010, the republican programme
“Preservation and Advancement of the Buryat Language in 2011-2014” hails
the idea of building a Buryat textual corpus, emphasizing the feasibility of
supporting suchlike initiatives.
The Mongol, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies Institute’s Linguistics Department,
which is leading the project, has already compiled a corpus of Buryat-language
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Work has been done with support from the Fundamental Linguistic Research Foundation (http://www.ffli.
ru), Project S-43.