The seminar of the leading expert in the field of endangered languages, chief researcher of the International Research Laboratory «Linguistic Ecology of the Arctic» of NEFU Lenora Grenoble and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Anna Dybo was held at the Northeastern Federal University. The event was held today, April 4.

Lenora Grenoble reminded that the international laboratory studies linguistic ecology to raise the sustainability and development of the languages of Yakutia. She also stressed that many do not understand what «language ecology» means. At the same time, this concept is borrowed from biology and examines how languages exist in a particular environment, how native speakers influence each other and how other factors affect the state of languages. «Now our laboratory is entering the next stage of work. For three years, a wealth of material has been collected locally. We see how languages live in a particular environment and we are interested in how the language ecology is changing. In this regard, one of the most important factors is urbanization. The population of the city of Yakutsk is growing, many are striving, if not here, then to other cities too. This greatly affects the state of the language,» Lenora Grenoble shared. She added that the language ecology is dynamic. Almost all cities are multilingual, there are no places where only one language is spoken, the scientist stressed: «Ecology is changing. For example, native speakers of another language come to Yakutsk. At the same time, I think they do not learn the Yakut language, they gravitate more towards Russian.» If the goal is to understand how languages will continue to develop, then we must first understand the life of the city and the life of languages in it. Urbanization as a global phenomenon is absorbing more and more settlements. «How this will affect multilingualism and the existence of languages in general is a scientific question for further research,» concludes Lenore Grenoble. She added that the laboratory researchers plan to develop a methodology for the coexistence of languages, where and how they are used, and so on. The second lecturer was linguist Anna Dybo. She presented a report on the restoration of the names of different types of dwellings for the selected stages of the existence of the peoples of the Samoyed and Tungusic-Manchurian language families. The work is based on the semantic reconstruction methodology developed by her.