K. F. Karjalainen´s Eastern Khanty Text Collection (1899-1901)

During fieldwork conducted between 1898 and 1902 in Western Siberia, Kustaa Fredrik Karjalainen traveled through the entire area where Khanty (also known as Ostyak) was spoken. He collected an abundant amount of lexical material from each dialect, and in addition he made grammatical sketches and collected folklore texts. Due to Karjalainen’s untimely death, he was unable to publish his collection. The Eastern Khanty text collection presented in this work is the hitherto-unpublished last part of Karjalainen’s legacy. It is of great significance from the point of view of both linguistics and folkloristics, as it is the oldest Eastern Khanty text corpus, and it documents genres that were previously unknown.

The present work comprises a phonematic transcription of the manuscript, its English translation, and notes explaining linguistic and folklore phenomena. In addition, it contains a linguistic description of three Eastern Khanty dialects (Tremjugan, Vasjugan, Likrisovo), and word lists of these based on the texts. A detailed introduction to the research history of Khanty and a summary of the contribution of the texts to ethnographic research place the presently published source into a wider context and set out further potential directions for research.