Nganasan language materials in space and time

Abstract

The paper provides an overview of Nganasan fieldwork data and archive resources. This description focuses primarily on the textual and sound materials, but other aspects that contribute to the documentation of Nganasan are also touched on, whereas textbooks and dictionaries are not considered here. We give a detailed survey of the available published and unpublished material as well. We do not discuss in detail fieldwork materials only available in Russian, e.g. such as Dolgikh’s rich folklore collection. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives some information on Nganasan and related languages. Section 3 addresses the early field notes, i.e. the resources before Castrén’s trip and his materials. Section 4 exemplifies the fieldwork activities of the 20th century. After that, in Section 5 we turn to the digitally available materials. The description is then rounded off in Section 6 with the description of the planned Nganasan database. The basic idea of the database is to collect and archive material from fieldwork.