Description and Goals

The goal of the projects is to provide innovative descriptive resources for and a modern linguistic analysis of two related Ob-Ugric languages Khanty (Ostyak) and Mansi (Vogul). The linguistic description and analysis involved is corpus-based, the data set contains fieldwork material from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries (collected and published e.g. by B. Munkácsi, V. N. Chernetsov, A. Kannisto and K. F. Karjalainen) to the beginning of the 21th century (collected and published e.g. by our participating researchers Márta Csepregi and Zsófia Schön) and is complemented by modern materials such as newspaper articles from Ob-Ugric publication media (e.g. the newspaper Лӯимā сэ̄рипос). The materials included represent different dialects of each language. The Surgut and Kazym dialects of Khanty as well as the Northern and Eastern dialects of Mansi were the topic of research during the project OUL – Ob-Ugric languages. The current project OUDB - Ob-Ugric Database adds material from Yugan Khanty as well as from Western Mansi (Pelym, Northern Vagilsk, etc.).

The website itself serves as a Virtual Research Environment and combines information on the subject with database interfaces, interactive tools, multimedia libraries and links to all major resources on the Ob-Ugric languages and culture, thus forming a comprehensive gateway to this field of interest.

Our website offers:

An encyclopedic section with

• a bibliographic database of publications on Ob-Ugric languages and related topics;
• an e-library (PDF files, scans or links to other open resources, including rare old publications as well as teaching materials on Ob-Ugric languages etc., all linked to the bibliographic database);
• a fieldwork archive (text and multimedia collections from fieldworks trips of various Finno-Ugric researchers);
• information on prominent Finno-Ugric researchers from several centuries and the history of Ob-Ugric research.

A linguistic section with

• digital text corpora:
• selected examples (published as well as unpublished material, information on transcription, orthography, etc.) in PDF format;
• searchable annotated text corpus (full text searches, concordances, semantic searches);
• searchable corpus-based e-dictionaries for all dialects;
• grammar sketches for all dialects (including paradigms, descriptions and definitions);
• an analysis of functional and pragmatic categories including a (semi) automatic annotation of functional, semantic and pragmatic roles as well as a referential tagging.

This website on Ob-Ugric languages offers valuable information and new insights for a wide range of interests: e.g. Finno-Ugric linguists, typologists, ethnographers, interested persons as well as native speakers of Ob-Ugric languages. We would especially welcome contributions regarding publications and / or links on topics related to Ob-Ugric languages yet missing on our website. Please feel free to contact us also, if you wish to link any publications to our e-library.