Sub-project Enets
Enets belongs to the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic languages and is spoken on the Taimyr Peninsula. One of its closest relatives is Nenets.
Enets can be divided into two varieties: Forest and Tundra Enets. These varieties are increasingly regarded as separate languages.
While the speakers of Forest Enets are mainly located in the village of Potapovo and in the town of Dudinka, Tundra Enets can be localised mainly in the village of Vorontsovo and in the Tukhardtundra. With currently less than 30 speakers who fully speak Forest and/or Tundra Enets, the varieties are considered highly endangered.
In the INEL project, both varieties are being worked on equally, with the initial focus on Forest Enets. The Forest Enets corpus contains data from two different sources: First, published texts collected and transcribed by Tibor Mikola, János Pusztay, Irina P. Sorokina, Darja S. Bolina, Kazis Labanauskas, Jaroslaw Gluxij and Wasilij Susekow in the 1960s - 1990s. Second, transcribed texts by Andrey Shluinsky, Olesya Khanina, Maria Ovsjannikova, Natalia Stoynova and Sergey Trubetskoy (preliminary transcriptions have also been made by Viktor Palchin and Zoya Bolina). These resources include modern texts collected by the researchers above in 2005-2010, as well as archival recordings by Irina P. Sorokina, Darya S. Bolina, Nina N. Bolina, Kazis Labanauskas, Oksana Dobzhanskaya and Eugen Helimski.