Tukhard 2017

The Tukhard fieldwork 2017

The Tukhard fieldwork took place on reindeer herders’ nomad camps in the Tukhard Tundra and in Tukhard settlement (Taimyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky District, Lower Yenisei area) in November and December 2017. The detailed sociolinguistic interviews with a retrospective component and language biographies of the native speakers of the Tukhard idiom of the Taimyr (Yenisei) dialect of Tundra Nenets were collected during the expedition by Maria Amelina. Field data show how a small-scale multilingualism was functioning in the conditions of mixed marriages and economic activities of the representatives of different local ethnic groups (Tundra Nenets, Tundra and Forest Enets, Dolgans) in Tukhard Tundra during the 20th century, how the multilingualism was lost because of “the big shift to Tundra Nenets”, and which linguistic ideologies (language ideologies) sped up or slowed down the process. Special attention was paid to the uniqueness of the local group of Tukhard Nenets, a lot of different ethnic components had been “dissolved” in this local group.