This  paper  analyzes  of  borrowing  of  Russian  conjunctions  in  Evenki  speech,  as  a manifestation of ongoing language shift under the influence of the dominant language. The aim of the study is to identify patterns in the use of the Russian conjunctions i (‘and’), a (‘but’), ili (‘or’) and to assess their impact on Evenki syntax. The data come from recordings of oral speech of speakers of the Eastern dialect living in the village of Iengra, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The Iengrinskii Evenki National Nasleg (the smallest administrative unit in Yakutia) is the only place in the region where the Evenki language functions in daily informal settings; however, Russian has already become the language of primary communication here. Our research demonstrates that the Russian conjunctions  are  systematically  used  in  Evenki,  replacing  the  traditional  means  of coordination  and  partially  changing  basic  word  order. These  changes  are  indicative of an overall shift in the balance of language dominance. The results underscore the complicated nature of syntactic influence in bilingual contexts and highlight that the borrowing  of  functional  words,  like  conjunctions,  can  be  an  indication  of  language shift.  Our  study  provides  a  detailed  analysis  of  the  role  of  each  of  the borrowed conjunctions and of the influence of Russian syntax on other components of Evenki.

Within the context of the global crisis of language shift, investigating the mechanisms of  language  shift  in  vulnerable  language  ecologies,  such  as  the  Russian Arctic,  is  of paramount importance. This article presents a sociolinguistic analysis of the dynamics of language shift among the Even and Sakha-speaking population of the Srednekolymsk District, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The primary aim of this research was to identify the specific features of language shift and the extent of this process  based on original field  materials. The  empirical  foundation  comprises  data  collected  during  expeditions to eight settlements in the district in 2025. A mixed-methods approach was employed, which included linguistic biographies, a picture description task to analyze spontaneous Sakha speech, and the narrative “Bridge Story” task to assess the language proficiency of the younger generation. The theoretical framework is grounded in the principles of critical  sociolinguistics  and  Lenore  Grenoble’s  multi-level  model  of  language  shift, which considers the interplay of macro-, meso-, and micro-factors. The results reveal a profound, multi-level shift in these settlements: the Even language has almost completely lost its everyday communicative function, surviving only in marginal symbolic and ritual niches, while the Sakha language is undergoing intense Russian influence, manifesting in syntactic calquing, lexical interference, and simplification of the morphological system, particularly in the speech of children and adolescents. A significant finding is the identified potential for establishing stable everyday bilingualism among a portion of high school students. Practically, the study provides evidence for developing Arctic language policies and  revitalization  programs  that  promote  functional  bilingualism  through  coordinated institutional, educational, and community measures

The article presents an acoustic analysis of glottalized vowels and glottal consonants of the Lamunkhin dialect of the western dialect of the Even language. The problem of the experimental study of vocalism and consonantism of Even dialects remains unresolved to date, since their description has long been carried out through auditory perception and subjective assessment. There is  a threat that in the near future the sound features of the Lamunkhin dialect of the Even language may disappear without proper  research  attention.  The  purpose  of  the  work  is  to  study  a  one-time  glottal insertion  (explosion,  bow,  click),  glottalization,  as  well  as  the  glottal  gap  (attack, indentation) using accurate objective methods. The novelty of this work is due to the fact that for the first time on the material of the Even language, a special study of various types of additional laryngeal articulation, formed when the glottis is narrowed and closed, was undertaken. An auditive analysis of the sound of vowels and a visual interpretation  of  their  illustrations  –  spectrograms  and  oscillograms  were  made. The  analysis  made  it  possible  to  formulate  the  following  conclusions:  for  glottal bowed and gap consonants, the obligatory is the preposition to initial vowels and the postposition to final vowels; the glottal insertion can act as a borderline suture between two vocal nuclei in the vowels of a complex formation; in spontaneous speech, the glottal  bow  appears  sporadically  in  place  of  anterolingual  consonants  such  as  [t] and [d]. In articulatory terms, all these phenomena are modeled by true vocal folds. The results of the study can be used in expanding the theoretical laws and principles of the phonetics of the Even language, in creating educational and methodological manuals for teachers and philologists of higher educational institutions

Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and deep learning have fundamentally transformed the landscape of spoken language processing technologies. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis have emerged as essential components driving digital accessibility across diverse linguistic communities. The Sakha language, representing the northeastern branch of the Turkic language family, continues to face substantial technological barriers stemming from insufficient digital resources,  limited  annotated  corpora,  and  the  absence  of  production-ready  speech processing systems. This comprehensive investigation examines the feasibility and effectiveness of adapting contemporary transformer-based neural architectures for bidirectional speech conversion tasks in Sakha. Our research encompasses detailed analysis  of  encoder-decoder  frameworks,  specifically  OpenAI’s  Whisper  large-v3 and  Meta’s  Wav2Vec2-BERT  for  voice-to-text  transformation,  alongside  Coqui’s XTTS-v2  system  for  text-to-voice  generation.  Particular  emphasis  is  placed  on addressing linguistic and technical obstacles inherent to Sakha, including its complex agglutinative  morphological  structure,  systematic  vowel  harmony  patterns,  and distinctive phonemic inventory featuring sounds absent from most Indo-European languages.  Experimental  evaluation  demonstrates  that  comprehensive  fine-tuning of  Whisper-large-v3  achieves  exceptional  recognition  accuracy  with  word  error rate (WER) of 8%, while the self-supervised Wav2Vec2-BERT architecture attains 13%  WER  when  augmented  with  statistical  n-gram  language  modeling.  The neural synthesis system exhibits robust performance despite minimal training data availability, achieving average loss of 2.49 following extended training optimization and practical deployment via Telegram messaging bot. Additionally, ensemble meta-stacking combining both recognition architectures achieves 27% WER, demonstrating effective  complementarity  through  learned  hypothesis  arbitration.  These  findings validate transfer learning methodologies as viable pathways for developing speech technologies serving digitally underrepresented linguistic communities.

The article examines the Buryat component in the dialectal   zoonymic  lexicon of the  Yakut  language, based on  the  names  of  wild  animals. The  relevance of the study is determined by the need to clarify the stratification of Mongolic borrowings in Yakut  and  to  identify the role of the Buryat language as a source of the later layer of  Mongolisms. The  aim  of  the  research  is  to  identify,  systematize conduct a  comprehensive analysis  of  dialectal  zoonyms  of  Buryat  origin, as well as  to  determine their semantic,  phonetic,  and  areal  characteristics. The  research material consists of dialectal data of the Yakut language recorded in lexicographic and  dialectological sources,  as  well  as  comparative  data  from  Buryat  and  other Mongolic languages. The study employs the comparative-hand semasiological methods, along with techniques  of lexical-semantic and phonetic analysis and elements of areal linguistics. The results demonstrate that in a number of cases Buryat forms serve as the closest correspondences to Yakut dialectal animal names, which makes it possible to explain both semantic shifts and features of the phonetic  adaptation  of  borrowings.  It  is  established  that  the  Buryat  component  is most clearly represented in the southern and western dialects of the Yakut language and  reflects  a  later  stage  of  language  contacts.  The  borrowed  units  are  shown  to exhibit  varying  degrees  of  semantic  transformation,  ranging  from  preservation  of the  original  meaning  to  metonymic  and  zoomorphic  reinterpretations  conditioned by a new natural environment. The findings refine current views on the mechanisms of Mongolic–Yakut language contacts, contribute to the stratification of Mongolic borrowings  in  the  Yakut  language,  and  expand  the  empirical  basis  for  studies  of dialectal zoonymy. The materials of the article may be used in further etymological and dialectological research, lexicographic practice, and in the digital documentation of dialectal vocabulary.

In  the  humanitarian  space  of  modern  civilization,  much  attention  is  paid  to  the phenomena of languages and culture of small ethnic groups and the problem of the revitalization of endangered languages. Currently, the linguistic systems of small numbered  peoples  are  being  studied  and  research  results  are  being  recorded. The lexical  fund  of  the  language  most  vividly  reflects  the  culture  of  an  ethnic  group.  A  promising  area  of  vocabulary  research  is  the  thematic  presentation  of  lexicon units. Words denoting residential buildings form an important part of the vocabulary of the language, they are the keepers of information about the development of an ethnic group in the process of space exploration. Lexical units that are part of the general stock of the Shor language retain signs of dialects and indicate inter-ethnic ties. The purpose of this work is to describe the lexico-semantic group as a part of the Shor lexicon. The research materials are original Shor texts, data from dictionaries, grammatical  and  etymological  descriptions.  The  basic  research  method  uses  the provisions of comparative historical linguistics, as well as the method of thematic description  of  vocabulary. As  a  result,  the  current  composition  of  the  lexical  and semantic division is outlined, the historical background on which the Shor lexemes function  is  presented,  the  connection  of  the  Shor  language,  its  dialects  with  the Turkic languages of different classification groups is shown. The integrated common Turkic vocabulary in the Shor language reflects the ancient genetic kinship of the Turkic ethnic groups. The lexicological description of the units of the Shor language reveals  its  areal  features.  The  fixation  of  thematic  vocabulary  and  its  contexts  is of  practical  importance,  it  helps  to  preserve  authentic  linguistic  units  necessary for  the  process  of  preserving  the  language  and  optimizing  its  use  in  the  oral  and written speech of native speakers. In the future, the considered lexical and semantic group “Residential buildings”, being an integral part of the thematic field “Human habitable space”, makes it possible to describe the names of settlement types among the Shors. The resulting segment of the lexicon will be included in the thesaurus of the Shor language as an integral part of it.

In social anthropology, the problem of leadership lies in the complexity of defining, analysing and studying this phenomenon in different societies, each understanding power  in  their  own  unique  way.  A  researcher’s  conception  of  ‘leadership’  and ‘leaders’ may not coincide with ethnographic reality and may hinder the search for leaders in local communities. This article proposes a method for finding leaders by studying perceptions of ‘erym’, which translates from the Chukot language as ‘chief’, ‘master’, ‘rapist’, or ‘strongest’. Based on field ethnographic material obtained in ten national villages in Chukotka, the article examines how residents of remote Arctic settlements assemble the image of a leader in their specific location, what criteria should be used to search for a leader in a settlement, and how the Chukchi language and beliefs system have influenced the contemporary understanding of what a modern leader is. We have identified two aspects which can be used to pinpoint a leader in a specific Chukotka community, namely, a person’s social position and qualities such as  strength  and  the  ability  to  command. We  have  arrived  at  the  conclusion  that  a person holding a leadership position in a village had already had certain leadership traits or had developed them in order to it the image of a ‘leader’ formed in that specific rural community. Local traits of a leader were expressed mainly through a description of a person’s activities, i.e. through certain actions that were important for that particular territory and community. The unchanging universal characteristics of a leader were strength (physical and psychological) and the ability to defend and exercise  violence.  Most  often,  when  searching  for  leaders,  these  characteristics have consistently produced results, leading to people who turned out to be the most important and influential in a specific community