Resolution

Participants of the International Round Table on the problems of Endangered Languages of Indigenous Peoples of Siberia (Moscow, IEA RAS, October, 27-28 2005), based on the discussed reports and presentations, made a collective decision to:

I. TO HIGHLIGHT THE IMPORTANCE OF ACTIVITIES HELD BY:

• UNESCO and aimed at the support of language diversity and development of a special universal strategy in relation to languages which could be intergrated into development programmes all over the world;
• Russian academic institutes and educational institutions, namely, Institute of Linguistics (Moscow) and Institute of Linguistic Studies (St. Petersburg) of Russian Academy of Sciences, Department of the Languages of Peoples of Siberia of Instiute of Philology (Novosibirsk) and Institute of Problems of Numerically Small Peoples of the North (Yakutsk) of Siberian Branch of RAS, Laboratory of the Languages of Peoples of Siberia of Tomsk State Pedagogical University, Tyumen, Novosibirsk, Urga and Yakutsk State Universities, International Northern University (Magadan), Khabarovsk State Pedagogical Institute, and the Institute of Peoples of the North, RSPU named after A.I. Hertzen contributing to training of highly qualified teachers and researchers of languages of peoples of the North and Siberia;
• International and national foundations, programmes and societies with a goal of documentation of endangered languages, namely, DoBeS programme of Volkswagen Foundation and an analogical programme of Hans Rausing Project of German and Swiss societies of documentation of endangered languages, as well as such foundations as Endangered Language Fund, USA and Foundation for Endangered Languages, GB;

II. TO DRAW THE ATTENTION OF:

State Duma and the Government of Russian Federation

• To urgent necessity of development and enforcement of a special federal programme on preservation and development of the languages of indigenous numerically small peoples of the Far North, Siberia and the Far East; this programme would become a worthy contribution of Russia to the next decade of indigenous peoples declared by UN;
• To importance of support of programmes of specialized publishing houses, which activities are aimed at the publication of educational and methodological literature on the languages and cultures of peoples of the North;
• To implementation of well-thought politics of funding in this sphere which could facilitate actual preservation, documentation and development of languages of indigenous numerically small peoples of the North;

Ministry of Education and Science of RF

• To the necessity of allotment of more time to teaching courses of languages of peoples of the North, namely, to lessons of oral practice conducted in the Institute of Peoples of the North and other departments of RSPU named after A.I. Hertzen,
• to maintenance of teaching the languages of the peoples of the North and related subjects in educational institutions in the regions of North, Siberi and Far East, and to the necessity to provide those institutions with professional staff and high quality curricular masterials;

Presidium of Russian Academy Of Sciences

• To the urgency of creation of a specialized Interinstitutional Academic Center on documentation of materials on the languages and cultures of peoples of Siberia, headquartered in the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, RAS, which activities would be aimed at developement of specialized software facilitating record, restauration, preservation and, in most cases, rescue of unique audiovisual and hand-written materials gathered by Russian science in three recent centuries;
• to the importance of establishing a programmememe to publish a series of academic grammatical desriptions of languages of the peoples of the North, Siberia and Far East and bilingual dictionaries;

Russian Foundation for Humanities (RFH) and Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research (RFBR)

• To the necessity of creation of a special federal programme of documentation of endangered languages of peoples of Russia in order to facilitate large-scale activities in this sphere both by efforts of Russian researchers and joint efforts of researchers in the frameworks of international projects;
• To the necessity of special support of projects aimed at preservation (digitalization) of hand-written and audio materials kept in the saddest conditions in the majority of public and private archives;
• To necessary introduction of payments to informants for their work as a special item of expenditure in the budget of linguistic, folklore and ethnographic expeditions;
• To inadmissibility of preservation of discriminating conditions of participation of Russian part in international RFBR competitions where the work of domestic researchers is estimated and paid several hundred times lower than the work of foreign colleagus;

International Scientific Public and Private Foundations

• To inadmissibility of creating an image of understudiedness of the languages of peoples of the Far North and Siberia by ignoring the contribution of Russian researchers and pedagogues to preservation and development of these languages;
• To necessity of involvement of experts of Russian Academy of Sciences in the process of additional evaluation of applications for implementation of projects on the territory of Russia;
• To significance of a more balanced approach to the principles of payment to Russian and foreign researchers participating in the projects held on the territory of Russia and funded by present foundations: in the case if the principle of the single (standard) rate is chosen as a calculation basis of payment of services of Russian researchers, the payment of survices of foreign researchers during their stay on the territory of RF should, logically, be also based on it.

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