About the project

We are students and researchers from the Faculty of Humanities of the HSE University, Moscow. Since 2018 we are studying Pamir languages, especially Shughni. Apart from fieldwork (four trips to Tajikistan), we create digital resources facilitating the study of Pamir languages.

Our current goal is to develop an annotated lexical database of Pamir languages using digitized dictionaries. In addition, we have developed the Shughni corpus and morphological analyzer.

Citing the project

Please cite this publication when referring to the project or any tool developed by us:

Makarov Y., Melenchenko M., Novokshanov D. Digital Resources for the Shughni Language // Proceedings of The Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association, 2022. P. 61–64.

You can also use the following information to refer to the website:

In English:
Y. Makarov, M. Melenchenko. 2021. Pamir Languages (pamiri.online), Moscow: School of Linguistics, HSE University (Available online at URL: https://pamiri.online/).

Acknowledgements

This website was created within projects Computational and Linguistic Resources for the Shughni Language (2020–2021) and Computational and Corpus Instruments for Iranian Studies (2021–2022), which were supported by the Humanitarian Research Foundation of the Faculty of Humanities, HSE University. In 2023, we continued to digitize dictionaries of Pamir languages thanks to the support of Linguistic Convergence Laboratory.

Website maintenance is possible thanks to Umed Kalandarov.

We are grateful to the University of Central Asia for supporting our fieldwork in Khorugh, Tajikistan.

Team

  • Elena Armand Webpage
  • Artyom Badeev

  • Yury Makarov Webpage

    Research assistant at the Sector of Typology at the Institute of Linguistics, RAS; student at the School of Linguistics, HSE University. Yury administers and develops pamiri.online.

    Areas of interest: phonetics, consonants, phonological typology, Iranian languages.

  • Maksim Melenchenko Webpage

    Research assistant at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, student at the School of Linguistics, HSE University. Maksim is the developer of the Shughni morphological analyzer and orthography converter.

  • Dmitry Novokshanov
  • Vladimir Plungian Webpage
  • Ekaterina Rakhilina Webpage

  • Alexander Sergienko Webpage

    Research assistant at the Laboratory of Formal Models in Linguistics, student at the School of Linguistics, HSE University.

    Areas of interest: morphosyntax, agreement, Rushani, verbal morphology, complex predicates.
  • Daria Chistiakova

    Areas of interest: split intransitivity, differential object marking, clitics in Pamir languages

  • Niyaz Kireyev Academia

    Areas of interest: typology of prosodic systems, accent, intonation, historical phonetics and phonology.

  • Boris Yakubson Webpage

    Research assistant at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, student at the School of Linguistics, HSE University.

    Areas of interest: linguistic typology, deixis, nominal morphology, Iranian languages.

Vladimir Butolin, Elizaveta Vostokova, Faina Daniel, Valeria Grebneva, Violetta Ivanova, Stepan Mikhailov, Roman Ronko, Ivan Sarkisov, Victoria Timofeyeva and others.

Languages

Shughni

The Shughni language belongs to the Eastern Iranian group within the Indo-European language family. It is spoken in the east of Tajikistan and the northeast of Afghanistan and is not only the language of the Shughni people but also, according to some researchers, the lingua franca of the Pamir peoples. According to Professor D. I. Edelman, there are around 100,000 speakers of Shughni.
On this website, one can make queries within the digital version of the Shughni-Russian dictionary by D. Karamshoev and the entries created by the members of our research project.

Rushani

The language is represented by the digitized version of V. S. Sokolova's 'Rushani and Khufi texts and dictionary.'

Khufi

The language is represented by the digitized version of V. S. Sokolova's 'Rushani and Khufi texts and dictionary.'

Tools available

Online dictionary

The dictionary allows one to search the collection of dictionaries of various Pamir languages (currently represented by Shughni, Rushani and Khufi). The collection consists of digitized dictionaries (see above) and entries created by our project.

Morphological analyzer

The morphological analyzer splits words into morphemes and glosses them, that is, assigns labels for their grammatical and lexical meaning. This allows one to perform automatic grammatical analysis of large text corpora.

Corpus

A corpus is a collection of annotated texts which allows one to make search queries within grammatical features, morphemes, words and their combinations, translations, etc. Apart from written texts, there are some transcribed oral stories aligned with audio files. The corpus functions on the tsakorpus platform developed by Timofey Arkhangelsky.

Orthography converter

The orthography converter converts a text in Shughni from some most common writing systems to the Latin orthography adopted by the project. This simplifies the study of written texts the orthographies of which are extremely varied.

Other

Russian-English-Shughni phrasebook

In April 2021, the first version of the Russian-English-Shughni phrasebook (by A. A. Sergienko) was published. The .pdf version is available on this page.

Research group "Typological features of Iranian languages"

Since 2022, a research group on Pamir languages functions within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at HSE University (grant No 22-00-034 ‘Field and Corpus Research on the Languages of the Shughni-Rushani Group’). Current results are accessible (in Russian) at ling.hse.ru/pamir/.

Research seminar on Iranian languages

Since 2022, HSE University and Institute of Linguistics, RAS organize the research seminar on Iranian languages. Once in three weeks a study of some Iranian language is presented and discussed. Among the presenters were well-known specialists in Iranian languages such as Agnes Korn (CNRS), Adriano Valerio Rossi (Università Degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale), Oleg Belyaev (Institute of Linguistics, RAS / MSU) and others, though we also accept contributions from students. You are welcome to acquaint yourself with the annotations and materials of the previous seminars on this page. The working languages of the seminar are Russian and English; there is also a Google group where we make announcements and share other content related to Iranian studies. You are welcome to make a join request by following the link to the group above or sending an email to Yury Makarov (yura[at][the name of the current website]). We also encourage you to contact Yury if you would like to present your contribution to Iranian language studies on the seminar. Recordings of some talks are available on YouTube.

 
Please find seminar materials and announcements from 2022–2023 on the semiar archive page.