A meeting between Irina Novak, Director of the Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History, Maria Statsenko, "Voices of Peoples of Russia" Project Leader and Director of the Ideas and Meanings NGO (St. Petersburg), and Irina Semyonova, Project Coordinator, was held at the KarRC RAS. Previously, the organization requested permission from the institute to use fairytales from the collections produced by scientists after years of expeditions across northwestern Russia. The ILLH KarRC RAS has been conducting such field studies since the 1930s. The materials gathered over several decades have been systematized, transcribed, translated into Russian, and published at different times in collected volumes.



The "Voices of Peoples of Russia" project is a digital platform of voiced fairytales, where native languages are presented in a modern format. Its initiators advocate the importance of maintaining cultural continuity between generations and languages, especially in the Year of Unity of Peoples of Russia. The project team selects folklore texts, conducts media expeditions, creates audio recordings, and makes them freely available on the digital platform and podcast services, thereby compiling a "Sounded Map of Voices of Peoples of Russia". The project's goal is to bring the mother tongue back into families through fairytales, to make it part of the contemporary cultural environment, and secure the connection between generations.

– I consider it a good result that fairytales from Karelia were included in the project already at the first stage of its implementation. Importantly, all the selected texts are voiced and recorded by professional actors in the studio. We have agreed with the project organizers that we will also feed these recordings into the VepKar platform in the 'Audio Map of Balto-Finnic Languages of Karelia' section, – informed Irina Novak.

VepKar is an open Veps and Karelian corpus, created through collaboration between linguists and mathematicians at the Karelian Research Centre RAS. It contains samples of both written texts and spoken Karelian and Veps speech. Currently, the platform holds over nine thousand texts with nearly three million word usages. The guests also showed interest in this resource because it contains lots of folklore materials, which may also be used in the course of the project.

The first fairytales selected for the project required no modification. Yet, in the future, the institute's staff would be willing to provide expertise, for example, if texts will have to be adapted for a wider audience while preserving genre conventions.




Andrey Gorshkov, actor of the National Theater of Karelia

As the project organizers explained, the first stage involves creating a series of audio fairytales of Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia: Karelian, Veps, Komi-Permyak, Mordovian, and Finnish. Each fairytale is released in two versions – in the native language and as a literary translation into Russian. A total of 25 fairytales will be recorded. High-quality sound design is created by professional audio engineers. The folk tales in Balto-Finnic languages were voiced by actors of the National Theatre of Karelia Andrey Gorshkov, Alexandra Aniskina, Yulia Kuikka, and Ronja Kinnunen.



– The fairytales that our grandmothers read to us when we were children are ready-made modern podcasts. Our task is to locate them, record them in the minority languages and in Russian, and make them most widely accessible on all Internet platforms. In the future, it will also be possible to listen to a fairytale in a minority language using Yandex’s virtual voice assistant, Alice, – added the Project Coordinator Irina Semyonova.

Photos: KarRC RAS and Maria Statsenko