Dictionary of Archi (Daghestanian) with sound files and cultural materials

Greville Corbett, University of Surrey

Project Details:

Major Documentation Project. Duration: 2004-2007. £109,226

Project Summary:

Our purpose is to create a dictionary of Archi, a highly endangered language spoken in one village of a remote mountain region in Daghestan. Archi is remarkable both for linguistic reasons, and in terms of its cultural setting. Its morphological system strains credibility by the size of its paradigms (Kibrik calculates that a verb can have 1,502,839 forms), and the stems tend to pattern irregularly. Speakers of Archi are almost exclusively first-language speakers, and intermarriage is rare. The culture of the Archi is one of the most distinctive and best-preserved cultures of Daghestan. There is still time to record some of its unique artefacts. Archi was studied in the 1970s and a fine grammatical description was produced (written by Kibrik, Kodzasov, Samedov and collaborators), but there is very little available on lexical material. We plan to produce dictionaries with pictures and soundfiles to meet the needs of speakers and the interests of linguists.

Ongoing project description:

For more information, please see: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/