Daria Zhornik

Daria Zhornik

I am a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School Language & Literature at LMU Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), affiliated with the Institute of Finno-Ugric/Uralic Studies, and a research fellow at the Research Сenter for the Preservation, Revitalization and Documentation of the Languages of Russia, Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences.

My dissertation project is aimed at exploring the evolution of information structure in Northern Mansi (Finno-Ugric), based on a unified annotation and comparison of narrative folklore texts from eight consecutive time periods between the 1840s and 2020s. Apart from that, I am involved in general documentation and revitalization of Northern Mansi, as well as documentation of Naukan Yupik (Eskimo-Aleut), where I specifically work on phonetic research. At the Institute of Linguistics in Russia, I lead a project aimed at creating a manual for documentation of languages of Russia with special attention to the level of language vitality and the format of the documentation project. At LMU Munich, I also teach courses on Northern Mansi.

Fieldwork experience

Most of my fieldwork experience concerns Finno-Ugric languages of Russia. In 2015–2024, I participated in field trips to Moksha Mordvin, Hill Mari, Besermyan Udmurt and Northern Khanty, however, my main fieldwork focus is the Northern Mansi language. In 2017–2024, I undertook 11 trips with a total duration of around 30 weeks to this language and am planning future field trips. I have visited various villages, towns and cities in Western Siberia where Northern Mansi is spoken and performed extensive language documentation, as well as multiple revitalization efforts. Since 2019, I have been heavily involved in processing Northern Mansi archival data, e.g. Valery Chernetsov’s archive with Mansi texts from 1925–1938. I am fluent in Northern Mansi and am now working together with the Mansi community and local IT-specialists on the creation of a Northern Mansi online-translator and corpus.

In 2022, I joined a project on documentation of Naukan Yupik, an Eskimo language spoken in the Russian Far East, and I participated in four field trips to this language in 2022–2024. Apart from fieldwork, I participated in corpus creation efforts for Nganasan (Samoyedic) and Uilta (Tungusic).

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