THE KET LANGUAGE: FROM DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS TO INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
For centuries, linguists have been interested in the possibility of a genetic relationship between Siberian and Native American languages. In 1968 in his fundamental work “The Ket Language”, A.P. Dulzon wrote: “The Ket language being the most studied in the group of Yeniseian languages has a very complicated and peculiar verb morphology system. This system has many typological correspondences in its main features with the verb morphology system of Basque, Burushaski, many Caucasian languages and Native American’s languages” (Dulzon 1968). This paper focuses on common problems connected with the extinction of the Ket language and the current sociolinguistic situation in areas where Kets currently reside. Work on recording, processing and digitalizing archived language data performed at the Department for Siberian Indigenous Languages of Tomsk State Pedagogical University is also described below. The paper concludes with a linguist’s point of view on the hypothesis of Dene-Yeniseian relationship and also a lay-person’s point of view on it.
Keywords: Ket language, sociolinguistic situation, language shift, linguistic corpus, Dene-Yeniseian Hypothesis
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Issue: 1, 2013
Series of issue: Issue № 1
Rubric: LINGUISTICS
Pages: 38 — 44
Downloads: 1495