The Ket Language
Aleksandra Sitnikova
Abstract
This article is of the applied research nature, which was carried out within the framework of the cultural project on preserving the culture of the Krasnoyarsk Krai indigenous peoples by creating the children’s literature in these peoples’ languages. The article presents the key characteristics of the Ket language and culture: the place of the Kets’ residence, the issue of ethnogenesis, the Kets’ art, shamanism, totem beliefs and other aspects. The main part of the article analyzes the available linguistic materials about the Ket language and describes the corpus of texts in the Ket language that are currently available to the public. Particular emphasis is given to the value of digitizing the linguistic data on the Ket language in the context of modern culture virtualization and need for interdisciplinary researches of the Ket language (linguistics and cultural studies). The article hypothesizes that the linguistic data on the Ket language, which were accumulated during the 20th – the beginning of the 21st centuries, can be used as the basis for further culturological research of the key concepts of the Ket culture (the “bear”, for example). They will allow to reconstruct the picture of the world in the culture of the indigenous peoples of the Siberian North. They will also result in a social design of the methods for the Kets’ authentic culture effective preservation and development by publishing the children’s literature in the Ket language for teaching the native Kets their language from pre-school age.