Abstract

The article presents some approaches to and experiences of linguistic fieldwork in bi- or multilingual communities abandoning their ethnic languages in favor of a functionally more powerful language. The approaches were developed and experiences acquired in linguistic expeditions conducted as an integral part of a series of projects on language documentation and description undertaken at the Laboratory for Computational Lexicography, Research Computing Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University, and at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, in 1993–2019. We worked mostly, but not solely, with local varieties of three Siberian languages—Selkup, Ket, and Evenki in a vast territory in West and Central Siberia and in the Far East, including Sakhalin Island. The three languages have always been involved in intense contacts with each other, with surrounding autochthonous Siberian languages and with Russian. Crucial aspects of our approaches are considered and illustrated with examples of our field practices, among them a sociolinguistic survey of the community as a starting point in the field; the choice of language consultants and their involvement in linguistic work, interacting not only with full speakers but also with all kinds of semi-speakers of the documented language; work with all autochthonous languages of a local community ; text collection and all kinds of elicitation conducted in the field side-by-side; the use of diverse up-to-date audio- and video-recording techniques for linguistic and extralinguistic data fixation; collaboration with linguistic communities, and so on. Finally, the role of the field linguist in the transmission and preservation of language and traditional culture, and her/his responsibility in this respect, is discussed.