Yessey yakuts: history, language contacts, thematic word groups
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to study the language of modern Yessey Yakuts in a comparative way. The author studies the problem of the language of a separate ethnic group, the Yessey Yakuts, in close connection with their ethnogenesis and ethnic history. The theoretical and practical significance of studying this language is associated with insufficient knowledge about it and the lack of special scientific works devoted to the problem of contact between the Yakut and Evenki languages in this region. The Yessey Yakuts are a special group of the Sakha people, who separated from their relatives living on the territory of the modern Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) at the turn of the 17–18th centuries. Our observations have shown that the difference between the language of the Sakha people and the Yessey Yakuts can be clearly seen in the field of vocabulary. Among the extralinguistic factors that influenced the language of the Yakuts of the Lake Yessey in the Krasnoyarsk area, one of the main was close communication with the Evenki and Russian population of the region. The subject of the research is the modern Yakut, Russian, Evenki languages in their current existence. The object of the study is the language contacts of the Yakuts, Russians and Evenkis in synchronous and diachronic aspects from the standpoint of modern linguistic contactology. The material of the article was the author's observations made during the field work with informants—native speakers of the Yessey Yakut language, as well as the published works of well-known Russian researchers in Tungusic and Turkic languages: V.N. Vasilyeva, G.M. Vasilevich, A.A. Popova, B.O. Dolgikh, V.A. Robbek, A.I. Savvinov, V.I. Dyachenko, etc. Due to the fact that the informants were trilinguals (speakers of the Yakut, Russian and Evenki languages), the linguistic analysis of the material had to account for the possible processes of assimilation and for the degree of their significance. At the same time, when preparing the article, a number of diverse sources were involved: dictionaries, monographs, articles, guidebooks on the language, ethnography and folklore of the Yakuts, Russians, Evenkis, and Dolgans. The author comes to the conclusion that the language under study, i.e. the language of the Yessey Yakuts, has gone through a difficult path of contact, mutual enrichment and development; the Yakut-Russian-Evenki linguistic contacts are found primarily at the level of vocabulary.
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