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The Fate of a Language: A Brief Survey of Wotic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

László Szabó*
Affiliation:
University of New Brunswick

Extract

Wotic is one of the Balto-Finnic languages. In the nineteenth century, there were about 5000 speakers of this language. It was spoken between Leningrad and Estonia, in the area which is known as Ingermanland. Before the Second World War, their number was already drastically reduced (a loss of about 80–90% of the speakers). In 1939, their number was between 500 and 700. Even this small number of people who still spoke the language was spread out in a number of villages. Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Russian researchers who tried to note down some materials in this dying language even found dialectal differences between Eastern Wotic (spoken in the village which is called in Russian Itsepino), and Western Wotic which was spoken in several villages (for instance Korvettula, Mati, Velikino, Undova etc.)

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities (USSR and East Europe) Inc. 

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References

Notes

2. Sulo Haltsonen, Antal Reguly: Vatjalaismuistiinpanot. 1831. Julkaissut Sulo Haltsonen, Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 60/3, pp. 1–62 (Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 1958).Google Scholar

3. Bibliographic data can be found in my article: László Szabó, “Der Partitiv, der Nominativ und der Genitiv Singular als Objektskasus im Wotischen”, Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher Vol 36, (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1965), p. 67.Google Scholar

4. László Szabó, “Vót szövegek Mati faluból”, Nyelvtudományi Közlemények (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiado, 1961).Google Scholar

5. These and any further Wotic sentences have been translated into English by the author of this article. In this Wotic text, as well as in all Wotic examples further in this article, I made the phonetic transcription simpler.Google Scholar