Ebook: Middle Chulym: theoretical aspects, recent fieldwork and current state

Swarthmore College, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2003. — 12 p.This article presents results of fieldwork conducted in July 2003. We present the current state of the Middle Chulym language and speech community, a newly collected annotated text, a report of a native orthography, and some thoughts on the future prospects for the language. The Middle Chulym people speak one of the most critically endangered and least documented native Siberian languages. The Middle Chulym nation (native ethnonym [øs]~ [ø:s]), currently numbers 426 registered members. They reside in villages in or near their ancestral territory along the upper reaches of the Chulym river (native hydronym [øs] ~ [ø:s]) in Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk districts. The Middle Chulym language belongs to the Turkic family and is a peripheral member of the Altai-Sayan areal grouping, though located geographically north and west of this mountain complex.