Project leader:
Prof. Dr. Diana Forker
Project members:
Prof. Dr. Rasul Mutalov
Dr. Oleg Belyaev
Dr. Iwona Kaliszewska
Student assistants:
André Müller
Felix Anker
Teresa Klemm
Funding:
Volkswagenstiftung (2012–2019)
Final project reportpdf, 180 kb · de
Project description:
In this project, three linguists (Diana Forker, Rasul Mutalov and Oleg Belyaev) and one ethnographer (Iwona Kaliszewska) document and analyze Shiri and Sanzhi and the culture of the Shiri and Sanzhi people. Shiri and Sanzhi belong to two different Dargwa languages (East Caucasian), spoken in the central part of Daghestan in the Caucasus (Russian Federation). The languages are heavily endangered. We estimate that there are only about 200 Shiri families and about 50 Sanzhi families.
In the linguistic documentation and analysis of Shiri and Sanzhi we pay special attention to those features that are unusual for the East Caucasian 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 tense/aspect/mood and evidentiality paradigms.
The project provides a detailed and in-depth documentation of Shiri and Sanzhi through the collection of texts from a wide range of genres. At the moment, Diana Forker is finalizing a comprehensive grammar of Sanzhi Dargwa and Oleg Belyaev is working on a grammar of Shiri Dargwa. Forker and Belyaev have also compiled electronic dictionaries of both languages that are available through the project website.
Major publications
- A sketch grammar of Sanzhi by Diana Forker, preprint available on AcademiaExternal link
- Forker, Diana. 2020. A grammar of Sanzhi. Berlin: Language Science Press. access onlineExternal link
- Forker, Diana. 2019. Elevation as a category of grammar: Sanzhi Dargwa and beyond. Linguistic Typology 23(1), 59–106. access onlineExternal link
- Forker, 2018. Diana. Sanzhi-Russian code switching and the Matrix Language Frame Model. International Journal of Bilingualism. access onlineExternal link
Other materials
- Sanzhi-English-Russian electronic dictionary with almost 5,500 entries, published with DICTIONARIA access onlineExternal link
- Sanzhi corpus (analyzed, glossed, partially translated, around 44,000 tokens)
- Diana Forker & Gadzhimuard Gadzhimuradov. 2017. Sanzhi tales and legends. With a Sanzhi-Russian and a Russian-Sanzhi dictionary. Makhachkala. [In Russian] download bookpdf, 18 mb · de
- Iwona Kaliszewska (in collaboration with Agnieszka Krzyk and Iwa Kołodziejska). 2019. Plants from the village of Shiri, Dagestan. [In Russian] download bookpdf, 35 mb · de