Classification of Selkup Dialects in the 18th Century Using the Program LingvoDoc

The article examines the dialectal material of the Selkup language collected in the 20th century by A. P. Dulzon and his successors and by G. Miller, P. Pallas, and M. Castrén in the 18th century. From the perspective of dialect-differentiating isoglosses, the article shows numerous exceptions in the correspondence between the southern and central Selkup dialects. When looking at materials based on known isoglosses, it is difficult to identify systematic differences between southern and central dialects in the 18th century. This article, therefore, aims to investigate when the differences between the southern and central dialects emerged and how significant the differences between northern and central-southern Selkup were. To investigate this question, we uploaded five 18th-century dictionaries by G. Miller to the LingvoDoc platform (lingvodoc.ispras.ru). The graph-phonetic isoglosses and the basic vocabulary were then analyzed using proprietary programs. The results show that the northern Selkup dialect already differed phonetically and lexically from the central and southern dialects in the 18th century. It can be assumed that there were two Selkup languages at this period. In this period, there were no systematic phonetic isoglosses between the southern and central dialects, but lexically, they were already different from each other. It has already been established that all the phonetic features of the Narym dialect that can be identified in the 21st century were already present in the book by Saint Makary (Nevsky), “Materials for acquaintance with the dialect of the Ostyak people of the Narym region” written in 1887. Thus, it becomes clear that the phonetic differences between the southern and central dialects appeared only in the early 19th century, although the glottochronological analysis of S. Starostin places their separation in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE.

Selkup dialects, graphics, phonetics, lexicostatistics, archived dictionaries, audio dictionary