ASU News

The corpus of colloquial speech in the Adyghe language was initially formed by the staff of the Higher School of Economics. It is based on recordings from the Temirgoy dialect of the Adyghe language, made by participants in expeditions of the Russian State Humanitarian University in 2006 and 2010 in the villages of Kabekhabl, Pshicho, and Khatazhukay. Notably, for the first time, it will include recordings in the Abadzekh dialect of the Adyghe language, made by participants in a joint linguistic expedition organized by Adyghe State University and the Higher School of Economics, which took place in Adygea from March 31 to April 9.
 
The scientific and educational linguistic expedition was conducted under the framework of the University Partnership agreement, led by Associate Professor Yuri Lander from the Faculty of Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and a leading research fellow at the International Laboratory of Language Convergence. The participants of the field expedition visited four villages in Adygea, where they recorded interviews with dozens of native speakers.
 
Language is constantly changing and requires documentation, particularly in its colloquial and dialectal forms. The Adyghe language is classified as endangered. Recording and including texts in the Oral Corpus helps to preserve and study the phonetic and grammatical features of colloquial speech.
 
The morphology of colloquial speech differs from the literary norm in several ways, including the simplification of grammatical forms, variability, and expressiveness. In polysynthetic languages, such as Adyghe, morphology plays a significantly more essential role in constructing utterances. The Adyghe language allows for the easy and flexible formation of word forms during speech, emphasizing the uniqueness and richness of its grammatical structure.
 
Each aul has its own linguistic specificity. In Egerukhay, Pshizov, and Khachemziya, the expedition members studied the Temirgoy dialect of the Adyghe language, while in Khakurinokhabl, they focused on the Abadzekh dialect, which will be included for the first time in the Oral Corpus of the Adyghe Language.
 
Twelve students from Astrakhan State University and the National Research University Higher School of Economics participated in the expedition. Under the guidance of scientists, they mastered the basics of field linguistics, methods for collecting and processing data, and approaches to creating language corpora. They learned to conduct interviews with native speakers on various topics, including the ethnography of childhood, religious beliefs during the Soviet period, and biographical studies. They also recorded oral speech (dialects, local features), processed and analyzed the collected materials, and worked with linguistic databases.
 
The data obtained during the expedition will be included in the Oral Corpus of the Adyghe Language and will serve as the foundation for further in-depth scientific research.
 
Language corpora—electronic collections of texts accompanied by markup that allows for automatic searching of the available material—have quickly become an integral part of linguistics. They enable researchers to trace how language is used in reality.