ИСТИНА

The paper is supposed to present some results and share some experiences of several projects on documentation and description of Western Evenki local dialects realized (or being realized) at the Laboratory for Computational Lexicography, Computing Research Centre, Lomonosov Moscow State University during the last decade and a half (1998-2014). All our projects include fieldwork as their integral part, and in the field parallel with linguistic data collection we always lead sociolinguistic surveys of the settlements, in which we work. Our fieldwork area covers the territory of residence of the Western Evenkis (the Turukhansk and Yeniseisk districts, and the Evenki and the Taimyr municipal districts of the Krasnoyarsk territory, the Krasnoselkup district of the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous area, the Upper-Ket and Kargasok districts of the Tomsk region). By now 26 settlements with Evenki population have been surveyed. Today in all the settlements, including those where Evenkis represent the overwhelming majority and where people still keep traditional way of life, the main means of communication both at home and in the community life is Russian. Even the majority of elderly people speak much more Russian than Evenki. Children able to speak their ancestral language are extremely scares. The situation of language shift is today common for the surveyed Evenki communities as well as for the majority autochthonous local communities of Siberia. Meanwhile, each surveyed settlement gives a new fragment and quite often a new dimension of the linguistic situation in the area. In the paper I’ll touch upon the following issues: • specific features of linguistic situation in the surveyed Evenki communities; • Evenki life stories of our collection as a source of historical and anthropological data; • our collection of Evenki folklore (story-tellers, folklore transmission, traditional personal songs); • structural changes in Western Evenki local dialects: a case study of the category of clusivity (exclusive and inclusive forms of verbs, nouns and pronouns).