The INEL Dolgan corpus: Insights into an endangered language of Northern Eurasia

Abstract

The paper at hand presents a description of the INEL Dolgan Corpus that has been created from 2016 to 2019 within the INEL project, located at the Institute for Finno-Ugric/Uralic Studies of the University of Hamburg. The corpus aims to provide a digital research infrastructure for Dolgan, an indigenous language of Northern Siberia. Though Dolgan is a Turkic language, the corpus is relevant for researchers of Uralic languages both due to the close areal connections of Uralic with Dolgan on the Taymyr peninsula and on account of the fact that it is an example of electronic research infrastructure developed for an endangered language. After introducing Dolgan and the INEL project, the paper describes the INEL Dolgan Corpus in detail, focusing on its linguistic content, annotation layers and search possibilities. Finally, the paper provides an outlook on how the corpus contributes to furthering research on this endangered language.