Archi text corpus

Archi belongs to the Lezgic group of the Nakh-Daghestanian (North-East Caucasian) languages, being quite loosely related to the rest of the group. It has been long time surrounded by non-Lezgic languages and therefore has kept and/or acquired a number of peculiar features.

Here is presented a sample of texts collected in the village of Archi in 2006 and 2007. In total, over 50 texts of various genres have been recorded, including stories, conversations, tales, legends and songs. Most of them were recorded in both video and audio.

Two kinds of texts were recorded. First, some 30 previously published (1977) texts were re-recorded in video and audio, read by one of three speakers. (The original recordings do not exist anymore). Second, new texts have been collected, mostly dialogues and stories. Texts available in this version were all originally published in [Kibrik et al. 1977].

Кибрик А. Е., Кодзасов С. В., Оловянникова И. П., Самедов Д. С. Арчинский язык. Тексты и словари. — М.: МГУ, 1977.
[Kibrik, Aleksandr E.; Kodzasov, S. V.; Olovjannikova, I. P. & Samedov, D. S. (1977). Arčinskij jazyk. Teksiy i slovari. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo moskovskogo universiteta.]

The project was generously supported by NSF grant #0553546 «Five languages of Eurasia» (PI under the Documenting Endangered Languages Program, and by RFBR grants № 05-06-80351 «Minority languages and cultures: On the verge of extinction» and № 08-06-00345 «Multimedia corpora for endangered languages».