ИСТИНА

In this talk I presented the results of my research on ethnolinguistic history of the Lower Yenisei river, relying on methods of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic geography. This is the area of Northern Samoyedic languages (< Uralic), which displaced languages of the paleopopulation some 1000-1500 years ago. Despite huge distances, nomadic Northern Samoyedic speakers have always been in contact with each other, and mutual bilingualism, at least receptive/passive, usually without any socio-economic dominance of one group over the other, can be reconstructed for the recent past. For earlier centuries, it is possible to reconstruct numerous cases of bilateral language shifts by smaller groups of people (selected clans), apparently also through a transitional phase of bilingualism. Migrations of some groups and disappearance of some languages gave rise to more visible distinctions between the remaining languages, together with a more complicated spatial distribution of shared structures and lexicon. Beside presenting a broad picture of language diversification and spread in the area, I looked closer at several case studies tracking convergence and divergence events in the history of particular social groups and the reflections of these events in the structures of the respective languages.