Sub-project Kamas

Kamas belonged to the South Samoyedic group of the Samoyedic languages, which constitute one of the two main branches of Uralic languages. It was spoken in the Sayan Mountains in southern Siberia in Russia and experienced extensive language contact with the southern Siberian Turkic languages living there.

Kamas was considered virtually extinct by the first half of the 20th century. In the INEL project, various materials of the Kamas language were bundled and processed. These are already published texts, which have been digitised, glossed, and annotated, as well as materials from archives in Helsinki and Tartu.

Sound recordings of the last speaker of the language, Klavdija Plotnikova, who died in 1989, play an important role. The recordings have been glossed and linguistically annotated.

The INEL Kamas Corpus 2.0 is available for download under Open Access conditions and via web-based search.