Sprachenvielfalt in der Wolga-Kama-Region

The Austrian-Russian collaboration project at hand promises to create an open linguistic database for languages and language varieties of the Volga-Kama Region of European Russia, belonging to three language families: Uralic (Mari, Mordvin, Udmurt), Turkic (Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash), and Indo-European (Russian). The database will contain both audio-visual material on a wide range of varieties, and typologically informed research into structural similarities and differences between varieties of the region. Resources on the varieties in question will be maximally accessible to an international scholarly community as well as the speaker communities themselves and will be designed to allow comparisons between genealogically unrelated languages that have traditionally been described in vastly divergent research traditions, and contact-induced convergence between distantly related, or unrelated, languages and language varieties.
Data collected, transcribed, annotated and published through our project will primarily pertain to facets of the languages and language varieties under consideration that have not to date been adequately described, or only described for 1–2 varieties of the region, but not in a dialectological or cross-linguistic fashion. As the lexicon and morphophonology of the languages under consideration is adequately described (though said descriptions are in cases poorly accessible to a larger scholarly community), our focus will lie on syntax, semantics, pragmatics, information structure, and sociolinguistics – comparatively poorly described layers of the languages in question.
Our data will be published through a number of channels: traditional scientific journals, a number of monographs pertaining to research topics of individual scholars in our project team, our openly accessible online database (containing audio-visual data, typological information and description, and a catalogue of our scientific publications connected to the project). Furthermore, three grammars will be compiled in connection with our project: an English-language descriptive grammar of Mari and Beserman Udmurt (Shamardan variety) aimed at linguists, and a Russian-language grammar of Shamardan Beserman aimed at the speaker community itself as well as L2 learners.