Creating descriptive resources for the endangered Ob-Ugric languages: EuroBABEL in Vienna

The FWF project Creating descriptive resources for the endangered Ob-Ugric Languages: EuroBABEL in Vienna was part of the ESF/EuroCORES project complex EuroBABEL (Better Analyses Based on Endangered Languages), and within it, part of a pioneering research project in which practically all the major research institutions working with the Ob-Ugric languages the universities of Munich, Helsinki, Szeged, and Vienna, in cooperation with local and native-speaker researchers based in Siberia joined efforts to create accessible resources and promote the study of the Ob-Ugric languages.The Ob-Ugric languages Khanty (Ostyak) and Mansi ("Vogul), the closest, yet fairly remote relatives of the Hungarian language, are spoken in Western Siberia along the river Ob and its tributaries. They are severely endangered; in many or even most speaker communities, the transmission of the language to the next generation has already ceased. The Ob-Ugric languages have been investigated since the 19th century. There are grammars, dictionaries, text collections, studies on folklore and ethnography, but most of this rich material is not easily accessible, is not consistent with modern scholarly standards or is published in languages less widely known by Western scholars (such as Hungarian, Finnish, or Russian).The international project Ob-Ugric Languages sought to remedy this by offering accessible resources in the form of annotated online text corpora, e-grammars, e-dictionaries and an e-library (with either links or full text versions of open-access or old publications), a collection of ethnographic and folklore material and links to further resources. This material, available on the project website (http://www.babel.gwi.uni-muenchen.de) in English, German, and Russian, can now be used by linguists (for instance, language typologists), folklorists and ethnologists worldwide and also by people who for some other reason are specifically interested in the Ob-Ugric languages, their resources and their revitalisation last but not least, the stakeholders, the speaker communities, speakers and revitalisation activists themselves. (In the area of Finno-Ugric studies, this meant creating a completely novel virtual research environment.) Beyond all this, the overarching aim of the whole EuroBABEL project bundle was to contribute to the development of linguistic theory by way of new data and novel approaches. As part of this enterprise, the Viennese FWF project was specifically in charge of creating Internet resources in the Mansi language (Northern dialect): digitalising, transcribing and analysing texts as well as creating an e-grammar of Mansi. The analysis brought new insights into certain linguistic features and categories previously insufficiently described or not recognised at all.