Local Epic Traditions of the Evens: Linguistic Aspect

Abstract

The relevance and necessity of studying the Even language and folklore are conditioned by ensuring the full functioning of a language that is at risk of extinction. In Even folklore, the archaic epic nimkan occupies a special place, representing great value for its historical, cognitive significance as well as its artistic level. The study of local variants nimkans, conducted from a linguistic perspective, is highly topical and pertains to the still undeveloped problems. It is timely to classify samples into specific local groups, to examine the language features of epic texts in the areas of phonetics, morphology, lexicon, stylistics. There is a significant need for work on deciphering, translating, systematizing, describing field folklore material that has not yet been introduced into scholarly discourse. The aim of the article is to attempt to outline the direction of further research on the language of the Even epic, in connection with which a differentiation of the Even epic tradition is presented according to its distribution area and dialectal affiliation. The object of the study is the local traditions of the Even epic nimkan. The subject of the study is the specificity of the language of the Even epic tradition (phonetic, morphological, lexical, stylistic features). The research methods include: descriptive, comparative-contrastive, contrastive. The result is an original classification and systematization of the Even epic tradition by local groups according to storytelling centers and linguistic features of territorial variants of language idioms, based on preliminary identification of phonetic, grammatical, lexical features. The necessity of linguistic analysis of epic is emphasized, which will contribute to the further comprehensive description of the language of the Even epic tradition; the introduction of new folklore materials collected in field conditions from different groups, archival materials; the supplementation, clarification of features of still unexplored and little-studied Even dialects.

Keywords

• even language
• folklore
• even epic tradition
• local variants
• language features of the epic