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A group of twenty linguists, curators and historians from Russia, Japan, the Netherlands and Australia followed in the famous Russian ethnologist Shternberg’s footsteps this month. Shternberg was exiled to Sakhalin in 1889 because of his revolutionary ideas and did some extensive travelling around the island. He met with different ethnic groups of Nivkhs and Ainus and studied their culture. Twenty participants in the indigenous people conference held in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk joined a fieldtrip to the north to meet with the present day Nivkhs and catch a glimpse of their traditional culture. The trip was arranged by the Sakhalin Regional Museum.

The group went to Timovskoye by train and was transported by bus to their destination, the village Chir-Unvd. On the way the group is treated to a bread ceremony in the former exile village Kirovskoye. A group of eight ladies in traditional dresses offers bread with a salt dip – the symbol of hospitality. The Dutch linguist Tjeerd de Graaf of the University of Groningen is very impressed with this welcome. He whispers to his colleagues: "These people are so warm. Everywhere you come in Russia you get such a hearty welcome."

After a 90-minute drive the bus reaches the village Chir-Unvd – ‘new life’ in Nivkh. The village was founded in 1930 as part of forced mass collectivisation, which brought substantial changes to the Nivkh way of life. It marked the end of their system of winter and summer settlements, which maximised the benefits of local resources. Nivkh fishermen believed that hurting the earth by ploughing was a sin. In the 50s and the 60s small units were united into larger units: several villages were ‘closed’. Nowadays the Nivkh live in Russian-type dwelling houses in villages and cities of mixed population. They speak Russian, wear Russian clothes and eat Russian food.

As the group reaches the village the birch trees tell that the Nivkhs from Chir-Unvd still practise some of their old traditions. At eyelevel bands of birch bark have been removed from the tree-trunks. Nivkh use the bark to make things like boxes. When it is wet, it is flexible and can be modelled, when it is dry it is water-resistant.

As for the folklore, the Nivkhs still hold traditional festivals and give performances in different places on Sakhalin and abroad many times a year. The visitors are treated to a performance of Nivkh music, dance and singing in traditional costumes. The Nivkh women have cooked traditional food for the group to taste. Almost all meals are prepared with fish and often products from the forest are added.

Then the group follows in Shternberg’s footsteps. He made a trip on the river Tim when he travelled across the island. Two fishermen demonstrate the traditional way of fishing on the river, using a small canoe to set out the net. In five minutes they manage to catch a fish. One of the fishermen says the fish catch has gone down. The Nivkhs in the village do not only live from fishing; there are some farms. A Nivkh woman kneels down on the riverbank in her Sunday Russian suit and cleans the fish carefully. Australian participant in the field trip Tessa Morris-Suzuki says: "It is very good to finally see the things I’ve read so much about, like the river Tim."

In the village school, the visitors attend a Nivkh lesson. All children get two hours of Nivkh language per week up to the third class, an improvement from the year before, when they only had one lesson per week. On the teacher’s table is a scale model of a traditional Nivkh house. Holding a knife and dried fish up high, she explains to the children about the former way of living. The kids have to read Nivkh words and sentences aloud and write words on the blackboard.

The language is very rich in its stock of words in the areas of life central to the Nivkhs’ existence, such as nature, sea, weather, fishing and hunting. The alphabet has 46 different symbols, 13 more than the Russian alphabet. The vowels are similar to the Russian, but the consonant system is much more complicated than the Russian one. For example: the Nivkh language has k/k’/q/q’, where Russian only has k. The different consonants can give rise to different meanings: Ku is day, but k’u means arrow.

The future of the Nivkh language is unsure. Linguists think many of the 6,000 languages in the world will disappear in the next 50 years. They believe the survival of a language is uncertain when children no longer speak the language. UNESCO considers Nivkh to be a seriously endangered language meaning ‘a language with a substantial number of speakers but practically without children among them’. In 1989 the number of people on Sakhalin considering Nivkh their mother tongue was 447 on a total Nivkh population of 2008, which is 22.3%. Since then, the number of Nivkh speakers has further decreased.

De Graaf: "It is a very important task for the linguistic community to make a registration of the last speakers of the endangered languages in interviews with good sound recording equipment. The results of modern fieldwork and the reconstructed data from sound archives will provide important information for the preparation of language descriptions, grammars, dictionaries and edited collections of oral and written literature. These can also be used to develop teaching methods, in particular for the younger members of certain ethnic groups."

Since the beginning of the 20^th century, efforts have been made to study and register Nivkh. Recordings have been found from the recollections of a Nivkh informant who was interviewed by the ethnologist Shternberg in 1910. In the last ten years, Dutch and Japanese research groups have been co-operating in the field of ethnic minorities in Sakhalin, Yakutia and the Amur region.

This year, the Universities of Groningen and St. Petersburg launched the project ‘Voices of Tundra and Taiga’ in the framework of a Russian-Dutch research co-operation. The aim of the project is to set up a sound and video-library of recorded stories and of the folklore, singing and oral traditions of the Nivkh and Orok on Sakhalin and the Yukagir and Tungus languages in Yakutia. Existing sound recordings in the archives will be used together with the results of new fieldwork expeditions. The data will be added to the archives in St. Petersburg and elsewhere, whereas part of it will become available on the Internet and on CD-ROM.

The grant proposal to the Netherlands Scientific Research Organisation NWO amounts to 250 thousand guilders (about 100 thousand dollars) for a period of 3 years. The total project will have a longer duration and it will also be financially supported by other resources, such as a PhD grant from the University of Groningen and Japanese foundations. In July 2001, Sakhalin Energy decided to allocate 20 thousand dollars to support the project implementation on Sakhalin.

On the Dutch side, Tjeerd de Graaf will carry out the project with Cecilia Odé, who is a linguist of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. They will co-operate with the Japanese scholar Hidetoshi Shirashi, who has been recording and working out Nivkh speech on Sakhalin for the past year and will continue his work in Groningen and on Sakhalin from January 2002 until 2006, in the framework of the special PhD grant.

The linguists hope that all these efforts will help to revive Nivkh. It is difficult to say if they will be successful. "I don’t know if Nivkh will survive. Sometimes groups of 200 to 300 speakers manage to maintain a language. Some bigger groups of speakers however, loose the language", De Graaf says.

© 2002 Petra Wijnsema

Last update: 13 February 2003