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Expanding the Outreach of Yukaghir Language and Culture
The compilation of digital teaching aids in the Yukaghir language began in
2003, when 7 CDs featuring examples of Yukaghir folklore were released by the
Yakutsk Music & Folklore Museum as part of an international symposium on
the folklore of Paleo-Asian peoples.
In 2007, Yakutia’s Education Ministry, in association with research fellows
from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Small Indigenous Peoples of
the North, implemented a UNESCO project aimed at preserving the Yukaghir
language by enhancing the potential of ethnic schools in the republic’s Yukaghir
communities. As a result of this project, 14 language textbooks were released on
CDs and DVDs. The ministry built on that positive experience in subsequent
years, compiling five more CDs with Yukaghir speech recordings in 2009-2010.
In 2010, the Yukaghir language and culture specialists L. Zhukova, P. Prokopieva,
A. Prokopieva, E. Atlasova, and V. Shadrin, working in collaboration with the
North-Eastern Federal University’s Center of New Information Technology,
developed a programme for the promotion of the Yukaghir language and culture
on digital carriers and in cyberspace. Designed for the period through 2014,
the programme should become a real breakthrough in efforts to preserve the
Yukahghir language, including through the publication of relevant textbooks
and teaching aids. That project received wide support from the university’s top
and became part of its own development programme. It provides, specifically,
for the release of several dozen new-generation textbooks, the launch of the
links webpage www.arctic-megapedia.ru, and the organization of expeditions
into Yukaghir communities to collect ethnographic, linguistic and folklore
material. The effort has already yielded its first results – five Yukaghirlanguage
textbooks on CDs and a language & culture links webpage, prepared
with contributions from native speakers and tradition carriers. There is every
reason to expect that the North-Eastern Federal University will soon become
a major centre for the preservation and advancement of the Yukaghir language
and culture.
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