In September 2001 a linguistic expedition worked in the Russian Far East with Orochi, a minority of Tungus-Manchurian origin. The expedition consisted of Elena Perekhvalskaya (the head), Vlada Baranova and Kirill Maslinsky, students of the philological faculty of the SpbSU. It was financed by the American Council of Learned Societies.

The aim of the research was to describe the present situation of the nation of Orochi, paying special attention to their competence in the ethnic language. Lately the Orochi language was referred to as “completely lost”.

At present, the Orochi live in the Khabarovsk region mostly along rivers flowing to the Pacific and along the tributaries of the Amur river. In the frame of our expedition we interrogated the Orochi living in the following places: Sovetskaya Gavan’, Zavety Il’icha, Datta, Us’ka Orochskaya, Snezhnyj.

The main methods were

The interviews were held in a form of a conversation. People were asked about their personal information: age, place of birth and places of living, level of education, jobs, nation of a spouse. They were also asked about their previous usage of their ethnic language, if they ever spoke it before, when, with whom, and weather they speak it now. They were also asked to tell a short text in Orochi language.

We were also interested if the interrogated people were acquainted with the traditional Orochi believes, weather they still perform their traditional rituals (like feeding the spirit of fire when in the forest and the like).

We interrogated all the Orochi older than 40 as well as some younger people and children in the settlements mentioned.

Old people (60+) were asked to translate phrases from the linguistic questionnaire. This questionnaire was composed especially to test language competence of an individual. It began with very simple phrases, which step by step were made more grammatically complicated. So the “limit of competence” for every interrogated person was stated.

In this way we could estimate the level of language competence with each individual Orochi speaker.

Practically all the Orochi speakers should be described as “rememberers” according to the terminology of Nancy Dorian, though I should call them “forgetters”.

All people over sixty had used Orochi language with their parents and grandparents, but the majority of them belong to the generation that understood speech of the elders but answered them mostly in Russian. Those who used to speak this languages themselves, are mainly people of 75+- years of age.

In other words, the “fogetters” belong to two different groups: 1) those who used to speak themselves (active knowledge); 2) those who used to understand other people’s speech but did not speak themselves (passive knowledge). These groups may be clearly distinguished even nowadays by peculiarities of their language competence.

Representatives of the second group (passive knowledge) remember the language as a limited set of formulas. These formulas are typical question-answer phrases used in everyday life. The informants have very significant gaps in their language competence. For instance, sentences with 2 Sg are remembered (and reproduced) in the form of a question. Thus, the sentence “You work” is regularly translated by them as “Si densis nu?” “Do you work?” with the question marker nu. Obviously, forms of the 2 Sg. are more often used in questions. At the same time, it was difficult for our informants to translate interrogative sentences with 1 Sg. as a subject.

Concrete lexical items were also remembered as parts of learned formulas. When asked to produce a certain lexeme, the speaker tended to recall a formula that would contain this lexeme.

It seems, that the described “formula knowledge” is typical for a language in the situation of the language shift.

Those Orochi speakers who had used this language actively in the past are able to produce phrases with rather complicated grammatical forms. Representatives of this group had in fact forgotten their ethnic language because they did not used it for several decades. Theoretically, they could restore their previous knowledge if necessary, being exposed to the active use of the language.

Here I come to another interesting point. During the interviews all the inquired people without exception said to us: “I have nobody to speak to”. So, in one settlement of Us’ka Orochskaya six people belonging to both “competence groups” mentioned above, complained that they had nobody to speak to in Orochi. Obviously, they could speak among themselves but they do not do it, they use Russian instead of their ethnic language communicating with each other. It seems, that the real reason of not using the language is not the absence of interlocutors but the strong orientation of the Orochi “rememberers” to the usage of Russian.

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Traditionally, a linguist or an anthropologist studying language and culture of a certain ethnic minority tried to reconstruct a certain “ideal” situation that was always referred to the past. The present situation was usually perceived as a decay, as a deterioration of an “ideal life” that still was remembered by the oldest. Thus, a linguist or an anthropologist was in a permanent search of traces of the past, consequently he or she was interested only in the oldest representatives of the nation in question. This “Past” was often regarded as practically static, that almost had no inner changes.

The same can be said about the researches dedicated to the Orochi. They are one of the smallest nations of Russia (about 500 persons), nevertheless they attracted the atantion of researches. Two books on Orochi culture were published lately (S.V. Bereznitsky “Mythology and religious believes of the Orochi”, SPb, 1999 and A. Turajev (ed.) “The Orochi history and culture”, SPb, 2001). These are valuable sources on the Orochi traditional culture (especially I have to appreciate the book by Bereznitsky) but they both describe only the past of this nation.

Bereznitsky described the situation with the Orochi language in this way: “At present, the Orochi have forgotten their own language. Only the eldest are able to produce several phrases”.

The given description seems very typical. It is considered sufficient both for an author and for readers. Still there are questions like the following:

The same questions arise when reading about nations which “forgot” their traditional rituals and believes and abandoned their material culture. It is worth getting answers to the questions:

This new approach was used in our expedition, and the data collected are in the process of being processed.