Working with the last speaker of a language

Presented by Olga Kazakevich at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024 Itelmen is spoken in the South-West of Kamchatka. Some researchers regard it as a part of the Chukot-Kamchatka language family. It is represented by two dialects – Northern and Southern. In the 2010s there were several competent speakers of both dialects, but during the сovid epidemic and right after it most of them left this world. In the paper I present my experience of the fieldwork with the last speaker of the Northern dialect of Itelmen (2022, 2023). This is a lady of 85, Liudmila Egorovna Pravdoshina. Almost all her life she worked as a milkmaid on a collective farm. She is not only most competent in the language, she is also willing to share her knowledge with all those who are interested in it. It so happened that Liudmila Egorovna appeared to be the last competent speaker not only of her native dialect, but also of the Itelmen language in the whole. There are only several “new speakers” of the Southern dialect now. Liudmila Egorovna is a great language consultant. She is ready to tell life stories and fairy- tales and then to help to transcribe and translate the recorded texts, to pronounce lexemes for a sounding dictionary, to elicitate grammar questionnaires. Most valuable are her life stories: they represent the history of the Itelmen community of Sedanka during all the XXth century. By now we audio and video recorded 15 hours of Itelmen texts, 3 hours are transcribed and translated. This is what might be called the work in progress, next field is fixed for June 2024. Actually, Itelmen might be called properly documented, but it concerns only its Southern dialect (eg. Stebnitskiy 1934; Volodin 1976; Georg, Volodin 1999; Krasheninnikov 1775; Worth 1961; Bobalik 1996). As for the Northern dialect, there exist only a brief grammar sketch of Tatiana Moll (1960) and two publications by Chikako Ono (2003; 2020). References Bobalik, J. 1996. Мǝзи’н Амӈǝ’л. Fairy-tales, legends and stories of the Kamchatka Itelmens. Georg R.-S. Volodin A. P. 1999. Die itelmenische Sprache. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Krasheninnikov S.P. 1775. Opisaniye zemli Kamchatki. SPb, Vol. 1, 2. Moll T.A. 1960. A sketch of phonetics and morphology of the Sedanka dialect of Itelmen // Proceedings of the Leningrad Teacher Training A.I. Hertsen Institute. 1960. Vol. 167. Ono Chikko. 2003. A Lexicon of Words and Conversation Phrases for the Itelmen Northern Dialect. Kyoto