Beserman multimedia corpus

This deposit contains monologues and conversations in spoken Beserman (formerly classified as a dialect of Udmurt, ISO 639-2 code udm). It contains recordings (audio and video) for 276 recording sessions, archived in a tar.gz format. The transcripts and metadata are published as a separate deposit: https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.16991 . For more details, see README.md in that deposit. The online version of this corpus, which is updated regularly, can be found at https://beserman.web-corpora.net/index_en.html.

These recordings (audio or video) are stored separately from the transcripts because they have a stricter access policy due to privacy concerns. After you download the transcripts, you can download the recordings and extract them in a directory called sound, which should be located under the same path as the eaf directory with the transcripts. This way, ELAN will be able to open the media files.

Beserman language

The language spoken by the Besermans belongs to the Permic branch of Uralic languages. It is spoken by about 2000 people, who live mainly in the northwest of Udmurtia. Unfortunately, the number of speakers is rapidly decreasing, as the transmission of the language to the younger generation stopped completely between 2000 and 2005.

Beserman has traditionally been regarded as a supradialect (dialectal group, narechiye) of the Udmurt language (as well as the only dialect within this dialect). The linguistic difference between Beserman and Udmurt is small, especially if Beserman is compared to the Northern Udmurt dialects. Nevertheless, the Besermans distinguish their language from Udmurt and consider it an important factor of national identity. Beserman is de facto recognized in Udmurtia as a language different from Udmurt. The Day of Beserman language and writing is celebrated in Udmurtia on October 21. There is no official Beserman orthography at the moment. Those who write in Beserman use slightly different spellings, generally based on the Udmurt Cyrillic script. So far, two books have been published in Beserman: Vortčʼa madʼjos (by Vyacheslav Ar-Sergi and Rafail Dyukin) and Pičʼi princ (The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translated by Rafail Dyukin).

Contact

If you have any questions, would like to propose a collaboration, or have noticed an error in the corpus, please email Timofey Arkhangelskiy at timarkh@gmail.com.

References

ELAN (Version 6.9) [Computer software]. (2024). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive. Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan

The preparation of this version of the corpus, as well as collection of some of the data, was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) grant — project no. 428175960.