Projekt

In this project, three linguists (Diana Forker, Rasul Mutalov and Oleg Belvaev) and an ethnographer (Iwona Kaliszewska) will document and analyze Shiri and Sanzhi and the culture of the Shiri and Sanzhi people. Shiri and Sanzhi belong to two different Dargi languages (Nakh-Daghestanian), spoken in the central part of Daghestan in the Caucasus (Russia). The languages are heavily endangered. We estimate that there are only about 200 Shiri families and about 100 Sanzhi families left. The project aims at a detailed and in-depth documentation of Shiri and Sanzhi through the collection of texts from a wide range of genres. We will pay special attention to those features that are unusual for the Nakh-Daghestanian language family and of broader typological interest. Two of these features are person agreement, which is based on the person hierarchy and not determined by grammatical roles, and extraordinarily rich TAM and evidentiality paradigms.

• Prof. Dr. Geoffrey Haig

  Universität Bamberg
  Institut für Orientalistik
  Lehrstuhl Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
  Bamberg
  

• Prof. Dr. Rasul Osmanovic Mutalov

  Daghestanian State University
  Department of Daghestanian languages
  Makhachkala
  Russland
  

• Dr. Diana Forker

  Universität Bamberg
  Fakultät Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften
  Institut für Orientalistik, Lehrstuhl
  für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
  Bamberg