14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Language Contact and Sound Archives in Russia

Liya Vasilyevna Bondarko (1), Tjeerd de Graaf (2)

(1) University of Saint-Petersburg, Russia
(2) University of Groningen, The Netherlands

In the Russian Federation, Russian is used for interethnic and official communication, and until recently this language served the same purpose throughout the former USSR. This situation resulted in contacts between Russian and other languages and language groups, such as Uralic, Altaic, Paleo-Asiatic and Baltic as well as other Slavic languages. These contacts are interesting from a phonetic point of view: We can study the influence that Russian and the other languages exert on each other in a situation of language contact. The main subject of this presentation is the versatility of problems we face in creating sound archives, problems which determine the structure of such archives. We consider the preservation of old sound recordings, the development of representative databases for the modern language situation, the analysis of the interrelation between different sound systems, the registration of the speech sounds for endangered languages and their revitalisation.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bondarko, Liya Vasilyevna / Graaf, Tjeerd de (1999): "Language contact and sound archives in Russia", In ICPhS-14, 1401-1403.